Posted by admin on Aug 4th, 2011
August 4, 2011 By JAMES KILGORE, Counterpunch
Last week Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) joined a demonstration in Washington D.C. to protest the refusal of President Obama to use his executive powers to halt the deportations of the undocumented. Gutierrez’ arrest came only two days after Obama had addressed a conference of the National Council of La Raza. Conveniently forgetting the history of the civil right struggles that made his Presidency a possibility, Obama reminded those attending that he was bound to “uphold the laws on the books.†With over 392,000 deportations in 2010, more than in any of the Bush years, many activists fear we are in the midst of a repeat of notorious episodes of the past such as the “Repatriation†campaign of the 1930s and the infamous Operation Wetback of 1954, both of which resulted in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Latinos.
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Posted by admin on Aug 2nd, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011, 07:22, Times of Malta
Hundreds of asylum-seekers clashed with riot police near an immigrant centre in the southern Italian city of Bari yesterday in a protest to demand refugee status that left dozens lightly injured. Protesters hurled rocks and metal bars at police lines, set off fires and trashed the facility on the outskirts of Bari. Police responded with tear gas and live rounds fired into the air and 30 protesters were arrested. The rioters blocked a main road and railway for several hours, disrupting regional train services and car traffic. A passing bus was also wrecked.
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Posted by admin on Aug 1st, 2011
By Amanda Crawford – Aug 1, 2011 9:01 PM PT, Bloomberg
Arizona, whose immigration law sparked a lawsuit by the Obama administration and national boycotts, aims to collect tens of millions of dollars in private donations to build a border fence with inmate labor. The plan, created by lawmakers and signed into law by Republican Governor Jan Brewer in April, would turn donations over to a group of Republican legislators, political appointees and four county sheriffs who have criticized U.S. efforts to combat illegal immigration. They say the fence is needed to stop an “invasion†that may include violent criminals and Middle Eastern terrorists disguised as Mexicans.
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Posted by admin on Jul 27th, 2011
Wednesday 27 July 2011, Guardian
Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist and author who popularised the term Eurabia for a supposedly Islamised Europe. Photograph: Gianangelo Pistoia/AP
One of Silvio Berlusconi’s former ministers has defended the thinking of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. Interviewed on a popular radio show, Francesco Speroni, a leading member of the Northern League, the junior partner in Berlusconi’s conservative coalition, said: “Breivik’s ideas are in defence of western civilisation.” Speroni spoke as other right-wingers around Europe, including leading officials of his own party, distanced themselves from the massacre on Utøya and the ideology that inspired it.
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Posted by admin on Jul 27th, 2011
Natasha Walter, Guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 July 2011 22.00 BST
When the government announced last year that it would end the detention of children for immigration purposes, it felt as if a ray of sunshine had broken into a debate that had become increasingly dark and cruel. I work alongside women and children who have fled persecution to seek asylum in this country. Too many are disbelieved by decision makers, and refused leave to remain. They can then be forced into destitution, locked up, or dragged to an airport. Yet their experiences are shrouded in a darkness made up of both ignorance and hostility.
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