Between January and the end of October, 463 people were killed in El Salvador, a 50 percent drop compared with the same period last year,
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How El Salvador's State of Emergency Has Impacted the Crime Rate - The New York Times - 0 views
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The emerging picture underscores a fundamental tension: In a country traumatized by chronic gang warfare, the crackdown has brought a respite from the violence, outweighing fears of democratic backsliding and giving an increasingly autocratic leader leverage to carry out his policies.
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Extortion, a key revenue stream for gangs, has also appeared to have plunged. According to the country’s security minister, Extortion cases have fallen by 80 percent since the state of emergency began. The figure is difficult to verify independently, but several business leaders interviewed by The New York Times said Extortion had gone down significantly.
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While a lack of transparency by the Bukele government makes it hard to assess the credibility of official crime data, experts say there is little doubt that there has been a notable reduction in violence since the start of the emergency decree.
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“This crackdown has been unprecedented,” said Tiziano Breda, Central America analyst at the International Crisis Group, an independent research organization. “Without a doubt this has weakened the gangs.”
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“Similar policies of mass incarceration and an iron fist in El Salvador and the rest of the region have shown that in the long term they don’t achieve sustainable results and bring back surges of violence,”
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Mr. Bukele’s approval ratings, according to polls, have remained above 80 percent, suggesting that many Salvadorans crave greater safety, even if it means a more repressive system.
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“They were so desperate because of the levels of violence and the control of the gangs,” said José Miguel Cruz, an expert on El Salvador’s gang violence at Florida International University, “that they will accept that sort of deal with the devil.”
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Since March, the Legislative Assembly, controlled by Mr. Bukele’s party, has approved legislation allowing judges to imprison children as young as 12, limiting freedom of expression, expanding the use of pretrial detention and permitting prosecutors and judges to try people in absentia.
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And indiscriminately imprisoning young men who may have done nothing wrong alongside gang members could result in a large population of disaffected youth who might make easier recruits for gangs.
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even if there is less violence in El Salvador, such a dip is likely to be temporary without addressing the root causes, including grinding poverty and corruption, some analysts warn.
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The state of emergency has been used as a blunt instrument, according to the Human Rights Watch report, with police commanders establishing a quota system requiring officers to arrest a certain number of people every day.
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The prison system is at a breaking point, with close to 100,000 people behind bars as of November, more than three times the capacity of the country’s penal system
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The crackdown has swept up not just gang members, but also children, women and the physically and mentally disabled. Some residents in poor neighborhoods who once feared gang members, say they are more fearful of the Salvadoran police.
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Ms. Solórzano’s younger brother Adrián, 30, was arrested in April and accused of terrorism. “It was a shock when the police arrived and said that they had to take him away,” she said, adding that her brother had done nothing wrong.
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Then on July 5, representatives from a funeral home came to the family’s home and gave them the news: Adrián was dead, strangled to death while in custody. It was unclear how he was killed or by whom.
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The Boehner Bunglers - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?
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The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party.
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the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
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Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect — the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence — reigns supreme.
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Even more remarkable, in its way, was the response of House Republican leaders, who didn’t tell the activists they were being foolish. All they did was urge that the extortion attempt be made over the debt ceiling rather than a government shutdown.
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It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.
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Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect political strategy, too.
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Everybody not inside the bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a terrible thing.
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shared by Javier E on 25 Dec 12
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Bruce Bartlett: The Debt Limit Is the Real Fiscal Cliff - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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fiscal crisis debt limit Republicans economics president
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Washington is all abuzz over the impending tax increases and spending cuts referred to as the fiscal cliff, an absurdly inaccurate term that both Democrats and Republicans have unfortunately adopted in order to pursue their own agendas. In truth, it is a nonproblem unless every impending tax increase and spending cut takes effect permanently – something so unlikely as to be effectively impossible.
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there is a very real fiscal problem that will occur almost simultaneously – expiration of the debt limit. Much of what passes for fiscal-cliff concern is actually anxiety about whether Republicans in Congress will force a default on the nation’s debt in pursuit of their radical agenda.
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No less an authority than the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who basically controls the Republican Party’s fiscal policy, has said repeatedly that the debt limit is where the real fight will be over the next several weeks
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MR. ALLEN: O.K., O.K., wait. You’re proposing that the debt ceiling be increased month by month? MR. NORQUIST: Monthly. Monthly. Monthly if he’s good, weekly if he’s not.
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In short, the debt limit is a hostage that Republicans are willing to kill or maim in pursuit of their agenda. They have made this clear ever since the debt ceiling debate in 2011, in which the Treasury came very close to defaulting on the debt.
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At the risk of stating the obvious, the debt limit is nuts. It serves no useful purpose to allow members of Congress to vote for vast cuts in taxation and increases in spending and then tell the Treasury it is not permitted to sell bonds to cover the deficits Congress created. To my knowledge, no other nation has such a screwy system.
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At some point, Treasury will lack the cash to pay the bills that are due and it will face nothing but unthinkable choices – don’t pay interest to bondholders and default on the debt, don’t pay Social Security benefits, don’t pay our soldiers in the field and so on.
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In a new book, “Is U.S. Government Debt Different?,” Howell Jackson, a law professor at Harvard, walks through options for prioritizing government spending in the event that Republicans insist on committing financial suicide. They are all illegal or unconstitutional to one degree or another. They would require the Treasury to either abrogate Congress’s taxing power, spending power or borrowing power.
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the question of what a president should do when he must act and all his options are unconstitutional. They cite Abraham Lincoln’s July 4, 1861, message to Congress in support of the idea that some laws are more unconstitutional than others and the president is empowered to violate the one that is least unconstitutional when he has no other option. Said Lincoln, “To state the question more directly, are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?”
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In the present case, of course, the one law would be the debt limit, which Professors Buchanan and Dorf say is less binding on the president than unilaterally cutting spending or raising taxes without congressional approval. Hence, if Republicans are truly mad and absolutely refuse to raise the debt limit, thereby risking default or the nonpayment of essential government bills, Professors Buchanan and Dorf believe the president would have the authority to sell bonds over and above the limit.
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There are a host of practical problems any time the president is forced into uncharted constitutional territory, as Lincoln so often was. But when faced with an extortion demand from a political party that no longer feels bound by the historical norms of conduct, the president must be willing to do what has to be done.
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shared by julia rhodes on 26 Feb 13
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Analyses - The Debate Over How To Deal With North Korea | Kim's Nuclear Gamble | FRONTL... - 0 views
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It was a playing field on which we were expected to pay the North Koreans not to do dangerous things, and that is not a sound basis for a policy.
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When Bush won the presidency, talks [with North Korea] ceased immediately. The criticism that comes from the Clinton camp is that there was no continuity in policy.
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I honestly don't see how, looking back, the architects of that agreement can hold the Bush administration culpable for behavior that, in retrospect, should make us reconsider whether the original Framework Agreement was a sensible idea.
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It is the policy of the government of North Korea, in my judgment, to use its capacity to do harm to elicit support from those who might be harmed by actions they would agree not to take
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The criticism of the Bush administration would be that it, in all of this tough talk and rebuffing the Sunshine Policy, that they have failed to get to the negotiating table and that things have only gotten worse.
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The Sunshine Policy, we now know, involves a lot less sunshine, a lot less light than heat -- massive payments, as I understand it -- in order to stage meetings that have political ramifications within South Korea, without any significant movement by the North Koreans in any direction that's any way helpful. So the Sunshine Policy has simply not succeeded. It's a failure.
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I think that we had a different view of what the 21st century could be like, with much more of a sense, from our perspective, of trying to have an interdependent world, looking at solving regional conflicts, having strength in alliances, operating within some kind of a sense that we were part of the international community and not outside of it. And I just think that basically many of them, saw the world quite differently.
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But the situation is quite different here, in that a strike on Yongbyon is likely to produce another Korean War, with hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, people dead.Well, we don't know whether it would produce another Korean War. But that's a risk.
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The so-called "Perry approach" was focused primarily on WMD -- did not embrace changes in the conventional force alignment, or did not embrace human rights issues.
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Now, this is a tough issue because there's no question that the Chinese should be interested in whether there's a nuclear Korean peninsula, and I know that one of the things the administration wants to do is to get the Chinese to take more responsibility for this.
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what should happen is that the North Koreans should freeze whatever they're doing, and we should freeze whatever military buildup and various things we're doing in the area in order to negotiate something new, which would be beyond the Agreed Framework.
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The Bush administration is saying we shouldn't have to give them anything. They're violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, they're in defiance of the world. They should be held to task; that appeasement leads to more aggressive behavior.
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It's not a concession. ... I think that I would not give concessions. There's no reason to. What you do is that you have various quid pro quos in any agreement, but if you decide up front that just having the direct talks is a concession, you're pretty much stuck. That's the problem.
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A concession, at least to me, is if one side concedes and the other doesn't. I mean, I think that there are ways that there are things we want, and there are things that they want.
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They wanted that reiterated. As far as I know, we have no hostile intent towards North Korea. Why would it have been such a big deal just to reiterate that? It's things like that where this administration has kind of dug its heels in and said anything that we did vis-a-vis North Korea is appeasement.
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I completely disagree because I believe that it is essential to see whether there's a way to have some agreements. We talked to Stalin, we talked to Mao, we talked to Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. We made agreements. I don't consider talking appeasement
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One of the lines of debate in pursuing Korean policy is whether our focus should be on nonproliferation or whether our focus should be on regional stability. These are two different ways of looking at the North Korean problem.
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I think that's an exaggeration. The clear policy of our government is that we find nuclear weapons in North Korea to be unacceptable and intolerable. Nobody wants nuclear weapons in North Korea. So why not talk to them?
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I believe the [Agreed Framework] would have been more effective if other players had been more directly involved.
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They just want to talk to the United States.Well, do we have to give them what they want all the time?
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I was surprised. I'm not surprised some people in the administration thought that. I'm surprised they'd take that policy approach to North Korea. I thought it was counterproductive.
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t may be therapeutic for us to to talk that way, but does not accomplish our objectives, and does not enhance our security. Indeed, as it's turning out, I think it's putting it in some danger
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I think it's quite possible that the North Koreans have already decided that they're going to become a declared nuclear state and that no amount of dialogue will stop them from that.
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For us to strike militarily at North Korea, given the risk that we would be incurring for South Korea, would be one of the most immoral acts conceivable. So we are left then, with only the option of engaging with them.
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But, yes, it's extortion, and we're rewarding bad behavior. But much of diplomacy is rewarding bad behavior. You're trying to figure out how you can stop the worst of the behavior at the lowest-possible price
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And that's the whole problem with one, the axis of evil concept and two, the doctrine, if it is a doctrine, of preemptive deterrence. That there are some things that you can't preemptively deter. And North Korea I think is a classic example. ...
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Those who criticize the deal because they cheated on it, I think are not understanding the nature of international politics. We have done deals with people who we expected might well cheat. And indeed, the Soviet Union cheated on all kinds of deals, massively in the biological weapons convention. You look at the deal and say
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I think they're worried about the survival of their regime, independent of what we would do, because they know that they are in deep trouble, in terms of their economy.
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And if it worked, I'd have no problem with it. There's nothing wrong with the rhetoric. The problem is, it hasn't.
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"We don't talk to these rogue regimes," and feel good about that, people may die because you failed to deal with this in an effective way, in a diplomatic way. It is not a concession, in my view, to the North Koreans to pay for performance on their part. You can call it a concession. You can call it appeasement. It is dealing with the problem as it is. It is preferable to me than the use of force.
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Russian Sports Agent and U.S. Marathon Officials Under Federal Investigation - The New ... - 0 views
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Officials are scrutinizing the agent, Andrey Baranov, for bribery and corruption, according to several people familiar with the case who requested anonymity because the investigation was continuing.
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The investigators are looking into whether Mr. Baranov conspired with American marathon organizers — including New York City Marathon officials — to allow athletes using banned substances to compete in their events.
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Mr. Baranov has not been charged with any crimes, and he has in the past been depicted as a whistle-blower who exposed cheating and corruption in track and field.
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The investigation is part of the Department of Justice’s broader inquiry into doping schemes that have already led to penalties against scores of Russian athletes and officials.
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Grigory Rodchenkov, the former longtime head of Russia’s antidoping laboratory, had told The Times that the Russian government ran an elaborate program to help the country’s athletes use banned, performance-enhancing drugs and go undetected.
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three dozen Eastern Europeans disciplined in recent months, after retests of their urine samples from the 2008 and 2012 Summer Games.
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United States law enforcement officials have focused on the agents behind those athletes, and the money they may have routed through American banks
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Mr. Baranov told sports ethics investigators in 2014 that Ms. Shobukhova had been subjected to extortion and paid half a million dollars to top track and field officials to conceal her doping violations, enabling her to compete in the 2012 Olympics
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The New York City Marathon spokesman said that no Russian athletes were registered to run on Sunday, in keeping with guidelines from global officials who have barred Russian athletes from competition.
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shared by julia rhodes on 26 Dec 13
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U.S. Sends Arms to Aid Iraq Fight With Extremists - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...raq-fight-with-extremists.html
culture history politics crisis policy u s arms aid iraq fight nytimes
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Frustrated by the United States’ reluctance to sell Apaches, the Iraqis have turned to Russia, which delivered four MI-35 attack helicopters last month and planned to provide more than two dozen more. Meanwhile, cities and towns like Mosul, Haditha and Baquba that American forces fought to control during the 2007 and 2008 surge of American troops in Iraq have been the scene of bloody Qaeda attacks.
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Using extortion and playing on Sunni grievances against Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government, the Qaeda affiliate is largely self-financing.
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The brutal tactics, some experts say, may expose Al Qaeda to a Sunni backlash, much as in 2006 and 2007 when Sunni tribes aligned themselves with American forces against the Qaeda extremists.
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The terrorist group took advantage of the departure of American forces to rebuild its operations in Iraq and push into Syria.
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Ayad Shaker, a police officer in Anbar, said that Al Qaeda had replenished its ranks with a series of prison breakouts, and that the group had also grown stronger because of the limited abilities of Iraqi forces, the conflict in Syria and tensions between Mr. Maliki and the Sunnis.
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“I fought Al Qaeda,” he said. “I am sad today when I see them have the highest authority in Anbar, moving and working under the sun without deterrent.”
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Despite West's Efforts, Afghan Youths Cling to Traditional Ways - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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interviews with dozens of Afghan youth paint a picture of a new generation bound to their society’s conservative ways, especially when it comes to women’s rights, one of the West’s single most important efforts here.
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“These young men grew up in a war environment. They don’t know about their own rights; how can we expect them to know about their sisters’ rights, their mothers’ rights or their wives’ rights? If they wear jeans and have Western haircuts, that doesn’t mean they are progressive.”
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Censorship, particularly when it comes to religious offenses, summons little ire. Many consider democracy a tool of the West. And the vast majority of Afghans still rely on tribal justice, viewing the courts as little more than venues of extortion.
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“Those who are pushing for the approval of the law, they are doing it to make Westerners happy,” Mr. Taib said. “Those with independent ideas are strictly against it.” His friend Mohammad Haroun, added: “I believe in women’s rights, but in strict accordance with Islam.”
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In reality, a lot of what is thought to be Shariah law in Afghanistan is actually tribal tradition. Some of the most severe cultural practices, like the selling of young girls to pay off debt, are elements of Pashtun code that would be unacceptable in most other Islamic countries.
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“Our traditions and conventions are telling us one thing, and the realities on the ground are telling us something else,” said Saad Mohseni, the founder of Tolonews. “People are actually acting in a very different way from how they are talking.”
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Our Democracy Is at Stake - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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What we’re seeing here is how three structural changes that have been building in American politics have now, together, reached a tipping point — creating a world in which a small minority in Congress can not only hold up their own party but the whole government
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When extremists feel that insulated from playing by the traditional rules of our system, if we do not defend those rules — namely majority rule and the fact that if you don’t like a policy passed by Congress, signed by the president and affirmed by the Supreme Court then you have to go out and win an election to overturn it; you can’t just put a fiscal gun to the country’s head — then our democracy is imperiled.
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“Democrats howled about ‘extortion’ and ‘hostage taking,’ which Boehner seemed to confirm when he came to the floor and offered: ‘All the Senate has to do is say ‘yes,’ and the government is funded tomorrow.’ It was the legislative equivalent of saying, ‘Give me the money and nobody gets hurt.’ ”
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the 2010 election gave Republican state legislatures around the country unprecedented power to redraw political boundaries, which they used to create even more “safe, lily-white” Republican strongholds that are, in effect, an “alternative universe” to the country’s diverse reality.
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while the country continues to grow more racially diverse, the average Republican district continues to get even whiter.”
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there is little risk of political punishment for the Tea Party members now holding the country hostage.
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the Supreme Court’s inane Citizens United decision allowed a single donor, Sheldon Adelson, to create his own alternative universe. He was able to contribute so much money to support Newt Gingrich’s candidacy that Gingrich was able to stay in the Republican presidential primary race longer than he would have under sane campaign finance rules. As a result, Gingrich was able to pull the G.O.P.’s leading candidate, Mitt Romney, farther to the right longer, making it harder for him to garner centrist votes.
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the rise of a separate G.O.P. (and a liberal) media universe — from talk-radio hosts, to Web sites to Fox News — has created another gravity-free zone, where there is no punishment for extreme behavior, but there’s 1,000 lashes on Twitter if you deviate from the hard-line and great coverage to those who are most extreme.
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These “legal” structural changes in money, media and redistricting are not going away. They are superempowering small political movements to act in extreme ways without consequences and thereby stymie majority rule. If democracy means anything, it means that, if you are outvoted, you accept the results and prepare for the next election. Republicans are refusing to do that. It shows contempt for the democratic process.
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shared by Javier E on 13 Sep 14
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Veterans of Elite Israeli Unit Refuse Reserve Duty, Citing Treatment of Palestinians - ... - 0 views
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Denouncing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians under occupation, a group of veterans from an elite, secretive military intelligence unit have declared they will no longer “take part in the state’s actions against Palestinians” in required reserve duty because of what they called “our moral duty to act.”
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In a letter sent Thursday night to their commanders as well as Israel’s prime minister and army chief, 43 veterans of the clandestine Unit 8200 complained that Israel made “no distinction between Palestinians who are and are not involved in violence” and that information collected “harms innocent people.” Intelligence “is used for political persecution,” they wrote, which “does not allow for people to lead normal lives, and fuels more violence, further distancing us from the end of the conflict.”
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“After our service we started seeing a more complex picture of a nondemocratic, oppressive regime that controls the lives of millions of people,”
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“There are certain things that we were asked to do that we feel do not deserve the title of self-defense,” he added in a telephone interview. “Some of the things that we did are immoral, and are against the things we believe in, and we’re not willing to do these things anymore.”
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he Unit 8200 veterans described exploitative activities focused on innocents whom Israel hoped to enlist as collaborators. They said information about medical conditions and sexual orientation were among the tidbits collected. They said that Palestinians lacked legal protections from harassment, extortion and injury.
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her refusal resulted partly from what she saw as a change in the military’s operations, or at least Israel’s response to it.
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When 14 civilians were killed alongside a Palestinian commander targeted for assassination in 2002, she said, “it made huge waves throughout the media and in the army, there were committees to investigate.” In Gaza, “things similar to that and much worse happened,” she said, but “there was no talk about it.”
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For a 29-year-old captain whose eight years in the unit ended in 2011, the transformational moment came in watching “The Lives of Others,” a 2006 film about the operations of the East German secret police.“I felt a lot of sympathy for the victims in the film of the intelligence,” the captain said. “But I did feel a weird, confusing sense of similarity, I identified myself with the intelligence workers. That we were similar to the kind of oppressive intelligence in oppressive regimes really was a deep realization that makes us all feel that we have to take responsibility.”
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Money Given to Kenya, Since Stolen, Puts Nike in Spotlight - The New York Times - 0 views
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When a Chinese clothing company swooped in and offered to sponsor Kenya’s famed runners, Nike panicked, Kenyan officials say.
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Kenya’s athletics federation — has led to a major scandal in Kenya, a country in the midst of its biggest war against corruption in years.
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In a contract signed several years ago, Nike agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in honorariums and a one-time $500,000 “commitment bonus,” which the former employee called a bribe.
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money was supposed to be used to help train and support poor Kenyan athletes who dream of running their way out of poverty.
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immediately sucked out of the federation’s bank account by a handful of Kenyan officials and kept off the books.
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For more than 20 years, Nike Inc. has been paying the Kenyan national runners’ association millions of dollars in exchange for the Kenyans wearing Nike’s signature swoosh, superb advertising in the running world.
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Ethiopian runners, who also excel at middle- and long-distance races, have a sponsorship agreement with Adidas, but an official there said their contract contained no commitment bonus
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In a sworn statement provided to Kenyan investigators, the former assistant said the $500,000 commitment bonus was “bribe money from Nike” so that the top officials could pay back the $200,000 from the scuttled deal with the Chinese company and then make even more by agreeing to sign up again with Nike.
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Nearly every day there seems to be allegations of some new scandal: a government ministry buying plastic pens for $85 apiece, a Supreme Court judge taking a $2 million bribe, questions about what exactly happened to the proceeds of a multibillion-dollar bond deal.
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Kenyan athletes were so outraged when they learned in November that hundreds of thousands of dollars from Nike had been stolen by their bigwigs that they staged a protest at their headquarters in Nairobi, with elite athletes camped out in the grass and holding up signs that read “blood sucers.” (Some of the runners never finished school.) Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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But those complaints may have been a ruse by Kenyan officials to get out of the Nike contract so they could receive a bribe from another company, said a member of the executive board of Kenya’s track and field federation, known as Athletics Kenya.
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The sports-marketing agent who made the payment, Papa Massata Diack, was recently banned for life by the International Association of Athletics Federations, a global governing body for track and field.
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After they received a letter from a Nike lawyer saying there were no legal grounds to terminate the contract, the Kenyan officials abruptly changed course.
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They negotiated a new contract in which Nike agreed to pay Athletics Kenya an annual sponsorship fee of $1.3 million to $1.5 million — plus $100,000 honorariums each year and a one-time $500,000 “commitment bonus.”
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Nike executives refused to discuss the contract, issuing a short statement that the money paid to Athletics Kenya was supposed to support the athletes. It said that Nike conducted business with integrity and that “we are cooperating with the local authorities in their investigation,” a point the Kenyan detectives dispute.
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Western nations have threatened sanctions, and the United States government has been especially vocal about corruption, with White House officials unveiling a 29-point plan to root it out.
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He said corruption in the athletics federation was so ingrained and so brazen that officials routinely extorted money from athletes who failed drug tests. He also said the organization’s chairman, Isaiah Kiplagat, had asked Nike to wire the bonus directly to his personal account, a request that Nike refused.
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Within days, according to bank records, the $500,000 was withdrawn by Athletics Kenya’s top officials. There were no major track and field activities going on at the time, and the board member and the former administrative assistant said just about all of the money had been concealed from Athletics Kenya’s executive committee, including $200,000 sent to a bank account in Hong Kong.
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Analysts said this case was especially tricky because it did not appear to fall under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the American law that covers crimes involving American companies and foreign government officials.
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The Kenyan running association, while it receives some government money, is not a Kenyan government agency.
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He noted that sports federations, like Athletics Kenya and FIFA, international soccer’s governing body, which is embroiled in its own corruption saga, often fell between the cracks of the rules that governed businesses, public agencies and traditional nonprofit organizations, even though sports federations have qualities of all three.
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Cubans Still Fleeing Castro While They Can - The Daily Beast - 0 views
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Cubans Still Fleeing Castro While They CanIf Cubans try to float to the U.S., they’re sent back. So they take a great circle route overland that eventually funnels them across the M
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In the humid heat of Tapachula in southern Mexico, a group of 40 Cubans relax on a sea of mattresses in a migrant shelter usually filled with about 15 Central American migrants.
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“I left Cuba because the economy is in bad shape and I’m searching for a better life,” said 24-year-old Erick Fernández Márquez, sitting on a couch in the shelter.
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Cubans have traveled through Mexico to the U.S. for decades, but the numbers of migrants entering through land has been rising significantly since 2011. More than 27,000 Cuban migrants entered the U.S. from June to October 2015, a 78 percent increase from the same
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The Cuban Adjustment Act, dating back to the height of the Cold War in 1966, provides migrants from the Communist country with an expedited pathway to citizenship.
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Many migrants, like the Fernández Márquez brothers, fear another change in policy, spurred by Obama’s December 2014 announcement that would initiate formal relations with Cuba, which could limit their eligibility to gain legal status in the U.S.
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“Everything is so expensive. If you go to the store to buy something, your salary is not going to be enough,” said José Fernández Márquez. “Cuba doesn’t change. It’s always the same.”
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Visa regulations are already evolving as some immigration offices in Central America and Mexico feel the burden of processing Cuban migrants for exit visas, which allow them a short grace period to willingly leave the country.
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More than 3,000 Cubans remain stranded in Costa Rica since Nicaragua denied them passage weeks ago, claiming that the country closed the border with Costa Rica to protects its sovereignty.
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Traveling through eight countries provides more safety and reliability than a boat directly from the island across 90 miles of water between Cuba and Key West, Florida.
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A four-hour flight from southern Mexico to the U.S. border will complete their month-long, $4,000 journey. Extra money from relatives in the U.S. and a transit visa in Mexico allows the brothers to avoid the risk of corrupt officials, gangs, and extortion in Mexico.
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“I would like for anyone who is having a tough time to be able to search for a better life,” said José Fernández Márquez of U.S. immigration policy. “Or that Cuba changes so we don’t have to migrate.”
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U.S.-led coalition says it killed ISIS finance minister - CNN.com - 0 views
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announcement came on the same day that the U.S. Treasury Department detailed its efforts with other countries to stop the flow of money to ISIS
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"Killing him and his predecessors exhausts the knowledge and talent needed to coordinate funding within the organization,
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Abu Rahman al-Tunisi, who was believed to be responsible for coordinating the movement of information, people and weapons.
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Opinion | Kavanaugh and the Politics of Bad Faith - The New York Times - 0 views
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now Collins, other Republicans and conservative activists are describing the pressure over Kavanaugh as “bribery,” “extortion” and “blackmail.” And some of those claiming that normal political activism is somehow illegitimate are the very same big donors who warned Republicans to pass tax cuts or else
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Calling this about-face hypocrisy is fair, but feels inadequate. We’re looking at something much bigger and more pervasive than mere hypocrisy: We’re talking about bad faith on an epic scale.
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“Bad faith” is, by the way, a legal term, referring to “entering into an agreement without the intention or means to fulfill it, or violating basic standards of honesty.” In politics, it usually means pretending to be committed to principles you abandon the moment they become inconvenient. And bad faith in this sense pervades almost everything the modern G.O.P. says and does.
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Why has the G.O.P. become the party of bad faith? Mainly, I suspect, because its core policy agenda of cutting taxes on the rich while slashing social programs is deeply unpopular. So to win elections it must obscure its true policies — like the Republicans now claiming, falsely, that they want to protect Americans with pre-existing medical conditions — and constantly pretend to stand for things it doesn’t actually care about, from fiscal probity to personal responsibility.
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After the Bust, Are Bitcoins More Like Tulip Mania or the Internet? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Even after last year’s bust, Bitcoin users are generally sending somewhere between $400 million and $800 million worth of Bitcoin across the network every day, according to data from the blockchain, the public ledger on which all Bitcoin transactions are recorded
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Speculative transactions accounted for roughly 60 to 80 percent of all transactions on the blockchain
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There is still quite a bit of mystery about what accounts for the other 20 to 40 percent of the transactions
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Chainalysis estimates that last year, companies handling Bitcoin payments accounted for 0.3 percent of all Bitcoin transactions, or $2.4 billion.
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The most compelling use that Bitcoin fanatics talk about is its value to people in repressive countries that have currencies that are even more volatile than Bitcoin.
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In several ways, it’s worse. Paying with Bitcoin requires you to become a speculator on its volatile price for the time you are holding on to token
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The list of ways that Bitcoin has proved useful to criminals keeps growing, from the ransom payments on locked-up computer files — or even hostages — to illegal drug sales
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The total dark net transactions in 2018, around $620 million, were more than twice the amount that Venezuelans bough
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drug purchases account for a much larger proportion of the Bitcoin economy than their proportion of the dollar economy
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Opinion | Facebook's Unintended Consequence - The New York Times - 0 views
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The deeper problem is the overwhelming concentration of technical, financial and moral power in the hands of people who lack the training, experience, wisdom, trustworthiness, humility and incentives to exercise that power responsibly.
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Now Facebook wants to refurbish its damaged reputation by promising its users much more privacy via encrypted services as well as more aggressively policing hate speech on the site
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This is what Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer, called “the judo move: In a world where everything is encrypted and doesn’t last long, entire classes of scandal are invisible to the media.”
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it’s a cynical exercise in abdication dressed as an act of responsibility. Knock a few high-profile bigots down. Throw a thick carpet over much of the rest. Then figure out how to extract a profit from your new model.
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On the one hand, Facebook will be hosting the worst kinds of online behavior. In a public note in March, Zuckerberg admitted that encryption will help facilitate “truly terrible things like child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion.” (For that, he promised to “work with law enforcement.” Great.)
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On the other hand, Facebook is completing its transition from being a simple platform, broadly indifferent to the content it hosts, to being a publisher that curates and is responsible for content.
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the decision to absolutely ban certain individuals will always be a human one. It will inevitably be subjective.
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The G.O.P.'s Doomsday-Machine Politics - The New York Times - 0 views
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. The bad news is that a form of doomsday-machine politics — in which you threaten to blow up things that you care about, because you think your rivals care about them more — is playing out in Washington right now, courtesy of the Republican Party.
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Doomsday-machine politics made its first U.S. appearance in the 1990s, when Republicans shut down the federal government in an attempt to extract concessions from Bill Clinton.
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Republicans tried again, with more success, in 2011, using the threat of refusing to raise the debt ceiling — forcing the U.S. government into default, with possibly catastrophic effects on the world economy — to win policy concessions from Barack Obama.
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And even though they now control the White House as well as Congress, Republicans are still in the doomsday-machine business — and what they’re currently threatening to blow up is health care for nearly nine million children.
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Now, however, G.O.P. leaders are in trouble. They need to pass a “continuing resolution” in order to maintain funding for the government and avoid a shutdown. But despite control of both houses of Congress, they don’t have the votes.
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passing the bill in the Senate will require 60 votes. With only 51 Republicans Democratic votes are needed.
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Protecting the Dreamers is, by the way, enormously popular, even among Republicans, who oppose deporting them by a huge margin. So it’s not as if the G.O.P. would be giving up a lot. But Donald Trump torpedoed the deal, apparently because he doesn’t want immigrants from “shithole countries.”
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Yet G.O.P. leaders seem to believe that they can bully Democrats by threatening to hurt millions of children — because Democrats care more about those children than they do. They also believe that if this tactic fails they can frame it as an exhibition of callousness by Democrats.
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Prosecutors: JCC bomb threat suspect tried to extort US state senator - 0 views
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The man, a dual American-Israeli citizen from the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, demanded payment every 72 hours via Bitcoin from Ernesto Lopez, a Republican state senator from Delaware. The man threatened to order illicit drugs on the Internet and send them to Lopez's house if he did not pay, the statement said.
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Mexico Passes Bill to Legalize Cannabis - The New York Times - 0 views
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Lawmakers in Mexico approved a bill Wednesday night to legalize recreational marijuana, a milestone for the country, which is in the throes of a drug war and could become the world’s largest cannabis market, leaving the United States between two pot-selling neighbors.
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The 316-to-129 vote in Mexico’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, came more than two years after the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that the country’s ban on recreational marijuana was unconstitutional and more than three years after the country legalized medicinal cannabis.
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The measure, as of Wednesday night, would allow adults to smoke marijuana and, with a permit, grow a small number of cannabis plants at home. It would also grant licenses for producers — from small farmers to commercial growers — to cultivate and sell the crop.
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If enacted, Mexico would join Canada and Uruguay in a small but growing list of countries that have legalized marijuana in the Americas, adding further momentum to the legalization movement in the region. In the United States, Democrats in the Senate have also promised to scrap federal prohibition of the drug this year.
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Critics say it is unlikely to make a serious dent in Mexico’s soaring rates of cartel-fueled violence, and argue that it is unwelcome in a country where nearly two-thirds of people oppose legalizing marijuana, according to recent polling.
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Security experts agree that the law’s practical impact on violence will likely be minimal: With 15 American states having now legalized marijuana, they argue, the crop has become a relatively small part of the Mexican drug trafficking business, with cartels focusing on more profitable products like fentanyl and methamphetamines.
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Some activists fear that the law will overly favor large corporations that could obtain what the bill terms an “integral license,” giving them access to the entire marijuana supply chain, from seed to sale, while leaving small-scale producers and vendors locked out of the lucrative market.
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“It’s a law for the rich, and marijuana should be for everybody,” said Ivania Medina Rodríguez, 18, a local activist. “They’re going for business before rights.”
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Legalization “is an important step toward building peace in a country like ours, where for at least a decade or more, we’ve been immersed in an absurd war,” said Lucía Riojas Martínez
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“We live in a country where corruption and extortion is the norm,” said Zara Snapp, co-founder of the RIA Institute, a Mexico-city based drug policy research and advocacy group.
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U.S. Lays Out Plans For How It Will Share Surplus COVID-19 Vaccines Abroad : Coronaviru... - 0 views
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The United States will send its first shipments of surplus COVID-19 vaccine doses abroad on Thursday, spelling out for the first time how it will share its wealth of vaccines with parts of the world struggling to get shots in arms.
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The Biden administration has previously said it would share 80 million doses by the end of June. "We know that won't be sufficient,"
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We expect a regular cadence of shipments around the world across the next several weeks. And in the weeks ahead, working with the world's democracies we will coordinate a multilateral effort, including the G-7 to combat and end the pandemic," Zients said.
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The U.S. has contracts for hundreds of millions more vaccine doses than it could possibly use — and this is a major move by the Biden administration to attempt to exert global leadership after months of pressure from global health organizations.
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The administration also removed contract ratings under the Defense Production Act that prioritized U.S. contracts for suppliers to AstraZeneca, Novavax and Sanofi — three vaccines not currently authorized for use in the United States.
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The first priority for doses shared through COVAX will be Latin America and the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, the White House said.
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The remaining doses will go to countries that have made their case to the White House, including nations such as India that have seen surges in cases; places such as Gaza, which is grappling to rebuild from recent fighting; and neighboring countries such as Canada and Mexico, the White House said.
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This won't be enough to end or reduce the life span of the pandemic. And that's why we're working with allies and partners to expand the production of vaccines and raw materials, including here at home,"
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"We're not seeking to extract concessions. We're not extorting. We're not imposing conditions the way that other countries who are providing doses are doing."
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In accordance with the administration's framework, the White House announced approximate allocations for the first 25 million doses that will ship:
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Both Biden and Vice President Harris leave next week on their first official foreign trips and are expected to discuss the U.S. plans for vaccine distribution. Harris is set to travel to Guatemala and Mexico City starting on Sunday, and Biden leaves Wednesday for the U.K., Brussels and Geneva.
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"It is time to have a global road map to vaccinate the world. That's what we hope will come out of the G-7 summit next week," Reynolds told NPR. "As long as this pandemic is raging anywhere around the world, Americans aren't safe, none of us are safe."
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Tom Hart, acting CEO of the ONE Campaign, said he was disappointed that the Biden administration has not moved faster to ship 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which U.S. regulators have not yet authorized for emergency use."Less than 1 percent of COVID-19 vaccine doses globally have been administered to people in low-income countries," Hart said in a statement. "This is a once in a generation crisis, and as we approach the G7 next week, the world is looking to the US for global leadership and more ambition is needed."