Alexandros Konstantinou, of the Greek Council for Refugees, said that convicting refugees as smugglers was part of a broader strategy to deter more arrivals.
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He Saved 31 People at Sea. Then Got a 142-Year Prison Sentence in Greece. - The New Yor... - 0 views
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Other measures included the criminalization of illegal entry in 2020, applied to migrants at the Greek-Turkish land border, which led to dozens receiving prison terms instead of going to reception centers for identification, and a recent decision by Greece to designate Turkey as a safe country for asylum seekers. That move was aimed at pressuring Turkey to take back migrants currently in Greece and make it harder for migrants to apply for asylum there.
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A root of the problem is Greece’s strained relationship with Turkey, which early last year stopped enforcing an agreement struck with Brussels in 2016 to halt the flow of migrants, and take back those who manage to cross into Greece illegally that do not qualify for E.U. protection, some observers say.
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Essex lorry deaths: The Vietnamese risking it all to get to the UK - BBC News - 0 views
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An hour's drive inland from the French coast, a dozen Vietnamese men nurse tea over a smoking campfire, as they wait for a phone call from the man they call "the boss". An Afghan man, they say, who opens trailers in the lorry-park nearby and shuts them inside.
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Duc paid €30,000 ($33,200; £25,000) for a prepaid journey from Vietnam to London - via Russia, Poland, Germany and France. It was organised, he says, by a Vietnamese contact back home.
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We were told there is a two-tier system in operation here; that those who pay more for their passage to Britain don't have to chance their luck in the lorries outside, but use this base as a transit camp before being escorted on the final leg of their journey.
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A Vietnamese smuggler, interviewed by a French paper several years ago, reportedly described three levels of package. The top level allowed migrants to ride in the lorry cab and sleep in hotels. The lowest level was nicknamed "air", or more cynically "CO2" - a reference to the lack of air in some trailers.
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A local volunteer in the camp told us that they'd seen Vietnamese and British men visiting migrants here in a Mercedes. And that once migrants arrived in the UK, some went to work in cannabis farms, after which all communication stopped.
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No one here had heard about the 39 people found dead this week.This journey is about freedom, one said.
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Understanding the China-North Korea Relationship - 1 views
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Evan Osnos explores China’s reluctance to pressure North Korea in a September 2017 New Yorker article.
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China’s policy toward its neighbor will critically affect the fate of Asia.
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strains in the relationship surfaced when Pyongyang tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006 and Beijing backed UN Security Council Resolution 1718, which imposed sanctions on Pyongyang. With this resolution and subsequent ones, Beijing signaled a shift in tone from diplomatic support to punishment. After North Korea’s missile launch test in November 2017, China called on North Korea to cease actions that increased tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
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China’s support for North Korea dates back to the Korean War (1950–1953)
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Bilateral trade increased tenfold between 2000 and 2015, peaking in 2014 at $6.86 billion, according to figures from the Seoul-based Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency
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In 2018, Chinese imports from North Korea plummeted by 88 percent, while exports dropped by 33 percent. Even in the face of mounting trade restrictions, established informal trade along the China-North Korea border in items such as fuel, seafood, silkworms, and cell phones appears to be ongoing, signaling that China may be softening its restrictions.
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China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States have provided more than 75 percent of food aid to North Korea since 1995. North Korea, whose famine in the 1990s killed between eight hundred thousand and 2.4 million people, has repeatedly faced extensive droughts and severe flooding, which seriously damage harvests, threatening the food supply.
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China has regarded stability on the Korean Peninsula as its primary interest. Its support for North Korea ensures a buffer between China and the democratic South, which is home to around twenty-nine thousand U.S. troops and marines.
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The 1961 Sino-North Korean Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, up for renewal in 2021, says China is obliged to intervene against unprovoked aggression.
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During their most recent meeting, Xi was welcomed to Pyongyang, marking the first time a Chinese leader visited North Korea since 2005.
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How Trump officials used COVID-19 to shut U.S. borders to migrant children - CBS News - 0 views
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But their rapid expulsions from the U.S. are part of the Trump administration's unprecedented efforts to use the COVID-19 pandemic as justification to sidestep legal protections for minors who arrive at America's borders without documents.
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By designating them public health threats who could spread the virus, the Trump administration has expelled at least 8,800 unaccompanied migrant children, some as young as 10, without a court hearing or asylum screening, circumventing safeguards Congress created to shield them from trafficking, exploitation and persecution.
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For the first time, Joe Biden's campaign on Sunday said the former vice president would order a review of the policy if elected.
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Children who set foot on U.S. soil without authorization have long been afforded additional legal protections
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Citing the CDC order, U.S. authorities have pushed 6,500 unaccompanied children back into Mexico.
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The Trump administration has denounced this patchwork of legal safeguards, arguing the protections encourage children from poor and often violence-plagued areas of Central America to journey north with the help of smugglers.
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Citing the pandemic, the Trump administration has argued that migrant children are not entitled to these safeguards, and that the laws that created them are effectively inoperative as long as the CDC's orders remain in place.
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Under that law, Mexican children can be transferred to Mexican authorities after being screened to ensure they are not victims of trafficking or persecution.
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They are the migrant children found by an "underground railroad" network of immigration lawyers, human rights activists and child advocates who support humanitarian-centered border policies.
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Did President Trump Keep His First-Term Promises? Let's Look at 5 of Them - The New Yor... - 0 views
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Has he kept the promises that helped get him here? And do his supporters care? A recent survey from New York University found that those who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 thought he had broken fewer than one promise out of five. Those who voted for Hillary Clinton said he broke more than four out of five.
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In reality, Mr. Trump has broken about half of 100 campaign promises, according to a tracker by PolitiFact. T
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Supporters of Mr. Trump who spoke to The New York Times said overwhelmingly that they were pleased with how he had lived up to his pledges. Here’s a look at how he fared on some of his signature promises.
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Over the past four years, the Trump administration had constructed 371 miles of border barriers, as of Oct 16. And it is on pace to reach 400 miles next week. However, all but 16 miles of the new barriers replace or reinforce existing structures.
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Alan Sanchez, 57, a defense contractor from Maricopa, Ariz., conceded that the president did not get it done. But he said he did what he could.
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The yearslong Republican campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act came to a head unsuccessfully and dramatically in the first year of Mr. Trump’s presidency, when Senator John McCain of Arizona cast the decisive vote against the effort.
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His campaign boasts that he has flipped the balance of three federal appeals courts and shifted nine appeals courts to the right. His nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the weeks before the election could reshape abortion rights, immigration law and the government’s regulatory power. Confirming a Supreme Court justice so close to an election was unprecedented, and Democrats framed it as an illegitimate power grab by Republicans.
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The Department of Homeland Security has argued that the new barriers have reduced the personnel needed to staff certain sectors, and reduced unauthorized immigration. In Mr. Trump’s first year in office, illegal border crossings did decline to the lowest point since the 1970s, but then increased to the highest point in a decade in the 2019 fiscal year before decreasing again this year during the pandemic.
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The 2017 tax cuts are one of the biggest legislative achievements of Mr. Trump’s first term in office, and one celebrated by his supporters.
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Some critics, however, have noted that the final tax cut that Mr. Trump signed into law was far smaller than what he promised as a candidate. The Tax Policy Center, run by the Brookings Institution, estimated that it was only one-quarter the size of the plan Mr. Trump campaigned on four years ago
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Mr. Trump said he would cut the top corporate income tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent, for example. His final bill brought it down to 21 percent.Those nuances, however, have been left out of his rallies, where Mr. Trump has been telling his supporters (falsely) that he succeeded in passing the “biggest tax cut in history.”
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While most Americans got a tax cut, high earners received 60 percent of the total tax savings.
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He vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement or withdraw from it entirely, pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and raise tariffs.He has delivered on those promises.
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Though some experts are skeptical that Mr. Trump’s trade policies have been economically beneficial — with the conservative Tax Foundation estimating that the tariffs have brought in revenue, but reduced wages, gross domestic product and job growth — supporters have been delighted.
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