Why Bernie Is Tough to Beat

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28 December 19
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28 December 19
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Why Bernie Is Tough to Beat
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Why Bernie Is Tough to Beat
Ember writes: "Dawn Smallfoot put up a Bernie Sanders sign in her yard after hearing him speak in spring 2015. It's been there ever since."
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The Capitol in Washington, D.C., is seen at dawn. (photo: AP)
The Capitol in Washington, D.C., is seen at dawn. (photo: AP)

Amber Phillips, The Washington Post
Phillips writes: "Even though President Trump has already been impeached, and even though it's a holiday week, and even though Trump spent that week in Florida, there was still news on impeachment as both sides negotiated the parameters of a Senate trial."
EXCERPTS: 
The Washington Post publishes a story underscoring the crisis the national security community is facing under Trump.
“For decades, the GOP cast itself as the champion of the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other national security institutions. But over the past three years, Republicans have repeatedly turned on those agencies when necessary to protect Trump’s presidency,” write Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe, after interviewing more than 20 current and former officials in and around impeachment.
Thursday
Through the morning until well after the sun goes down, Trump appears to be watching Fox News and broadcasting what his conservative defenders say about him to his Twitter feed. His message, as in much of his commentary this week, has been focused on trying to undermine Pelosi. He’s encouraging Democrats in California to oust her in next year’s election. (There is no party-specific primary in California, nor any real effort to run against her.)
Friday
The week ends much the way it began: With Trump tweeting consistently about impeachment and Pelosi, and with no apparent agreement on how or when a Senate trial to acquit or convict him will run.
Pelosi responds indirectly to Trump with a tweet Friday featuring a slickly produced video set to dramatic music of all the evidence impeachment investigators uncovered about Trump’s pressure campaign in Ukraine. “The facts aren’t contested. Only whether Republicans will do their duty and stand up,” the video ends.
Congress has another week off before returning to work in early January.


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A soldier in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

He Fled His Homeland for Safety in the US. After His Death, Who Was to Blame?
Washington writes: "Asylum seekers face competing miseries: violence at home, and a punitive detention system with a shard of hope for relief abroad."
EXCERPT:
Ronal had to disguise himself to escape this house back in 2012, a few weeks after witnessing Curamuerto kill El Chino. He fled north and spent nearly a year in the US immigration detention centers fighting for asylum. He lost his case, was deported, and then, five years later, and just a month before I met his mother, he was killed. His murder — committed, Sobe concluded, for having witnessed the killing of his friend — is another notch in the ongoing tally of asylum seekers refused protection in the US who are then deported back to their deaths.
In 2017, the New Yorker counted 60 such cases. In 2018, the World Politics Review counted, in just the last five years, in El Salvador alone, at least 70 such cases. But, as no official body keeps track of what happens to people after they are deported, neither of these counts is reliably accurate. More than one immigration attorney I spoke with as I was researching a book on asylum told me they were scared to look into it, scared to ask what happens to their clients after they lose their cases. Nobody, as far as I know, has included Ronal’s name in any count.
It’s possible the murder was unrelated to the earlier threats. It’s possible it was a random killing, or a mistake. Curamuerto had threatened Ronal five years earlier. When I pressed Sobe about the motivation, she couldn’t explain it. Why would anyone kill her son? It was a horrifying question to ask, even after his death. But Sobe couldn’t think of another explanation besides that it was related, that the gang hadn’t forgotten. One thing she is sure of, though, is that if the United States had granted him asylum, he would still be alive.
For more than half a century, the United States has been selectively accepting some asylum seekers and refugees, and sending others back to their peril. Since the modern asylum system was written into law, in 1980, and for decades before through the granting of parole to refugees, the United States has offered relief mostly to people fleeing political enemies.
At first, asylum and refugee protections were reserved for those escaping Communist nations, and then for those on the run from Communist countries in Latin America. The pattern continues: If you’re hounded by certain political foes, you’re much more likely to be granted asylum in the US. As of 2018, the grant rate for Venezuelans seeking asylum was about 50 percent. The rate for those fleeing China was even higher, at nearly 80 percent. Asylum seekers from the three countries in the northern triangle of Central America — El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — meanwhile, are only granted relief about 15 percent of the time.
Those numbers are not based on the actual needs or dangers faced by the asylum seeker, but by political calculation. That’s always been the case with asylum policies. The Roosevelt administration blocked thousands of Jews from escaping persecution thanks to arcane and racist determinations of who should be American. In one notorious example, more than 900 passengers on board the St. Louis were turned away in 1939 — 254 of them were later killed under the Nazi regime — because of a 1924 immigration law that limited the number of Germans allowed into the country. Just a year earlier, thousands of Austrians seeking to travel to the United States were turned away from the US Embassy in Austria shortly after Kristallnacht.
In the 1980s and 90s, Central American migrants faced a similar fate. As the asylum grant rate hovered around 2 percent, the consequences of being denied were deadly. In 1984, the American Civil Liberties Union submitted to the US House Subcommittee on Rules a list of 112 deportees who were either killed or suffered human rights abuses after their deportations.
While the Obama administration maintained the refugee and asylum policy status quo, they also amped up the arming of Mexico — funding the beefing up of its federal police and immigration agency, both of which had a track record of violence and corruption — sought to deter fleeing minors, and, in keeping with decades of practice, selectively denied hundreds of thousands of asylum claims. The Obama administration’s backing of a coup and a corrupt regime in Honduras, and its aid to police and military institutions rife with violence and impunity, all while only cracking the door open for refugees and asylum seekers, left many vulnerable.
Under the Trump administration, the situation has gotten significantly worse. Not only has the administration instituted a family separation policy, it has refused asylum seekers the ability to stake claims at ports of entry (through “metering” policies, which strictly limit the number of asylum seekers allowed to present and stake a claim at ports of entry on any given day) and pushed asylum seekers into de facto refugee camps just across the border in Mexico to wait while their case winds its way through the labyrinth of US immigration courts.
Officials have also taken numerous steps to limit who the relief can be extended to. For example, under a decision rewritten by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, women fleeing domestic violence — even when the local police cannot or refuses to protect them — are generally not eligible for asylum. Likewise, current Attorney General William Barr has made it much more difficult for those fleeing gang violence to be eligible.

At the same time, the Trump administration has begun foisting asylum responsibilities on El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and has dramatically dropped the refugee admission ceiling, to 18,000 in late September, the lowest since refugee laws were enacted in 1980. In the last year of the Obama administration, the ceiling was set at 85,000.


A vigil attendee holds a sign at the scene of a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, U.S., August 4, 2019. (photo: Reuters)
A vigil attendee holds a sign at the scene of a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, U.S., August 4, 2019. (photo: Reuters)

teleSUR
Excerpt: "The non-profit organization the Gun Violence Archive, which documents gun violence across the country, reported on Thursday that there were 38,730 deaths from firearms."
EXCERPT:
Of that number 14,970 were victims of homicide, murder or accidental shootings, compared to 14,789 dead 2018.
The other 23,760 deaths in 2019 were from suicides, the GVA said.
There was no figure from the organization for the number of firearm deaths by suicide in 2018.
There were 409 mass shootings and 30 mass murders in 2019, which GVA defines as incidents in which four or more people were injured or killed.
Such incidents caused around two percent of firearm deaths, with other fatalities resulting from domestic disputes, gang violence, robberies and accidents with firearms.
The GVA report found the regions with the most gun-related deaths during the past year were Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, followed by North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York.

It is estimated that in the United States, a country with around 327.2 million inhabitants, there are between 200 million and 350 million firearms in the hands of citizens.

Orthodox Jewish men pass police guarding a Brooklyn synagogue prior to a funeral for a victim of the shooting inside a Jewish grocery, 11 December. (photo: Mark Lennihan/AP)
Orthodox Jewish men pass police guarding a Brooklyn synagogue prior to a funeral for a victim of the shooting inside a Jewish grocery, 11 December. (photo: Mark Lennihan/AP)

Police Investigating String of Anti-Semitic Attacks in NYC
Associated Press
Excerpt: "New York City is increasing its police presence in some Brooklyn neighborhoods with large Jewish populations after possibly antisemitic attacks during the Hanukkah holiday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said after the latest episode happened Friday."
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Supporters hold up banners at a rally against the indictments of Benjamin Netanyahu on November 26, 2019, in Tel Aviv, Israel. (photo: Amir Levy/Getty Images)
Supporters hold up banners at a rally against the indictments of Benjamin Netanyahu on November 26, 2019, in Tel Aviv, Israel. (photo: Amir Levy/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Vows US recognition of Israeli settlements

Netanyahu Wins Likud Party's Primary, Setting Up Another Election Run
Bill Chappell, NPR
Chappell writes: "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be his party's leader when Israel holds a national election in March, after notching a landslide victory in the Likud Party primary Thursday."
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Two years after the 2010 BP oil spill, pelicans nest in an area that was heavily affected. (photo: Ted Jackson/The Times-Picayune/The Advocate)
Two years after the 2010 BP oil spill, pelicans nest in an area that was heavily affected. (photo: Ted Jackson/The Times-Picayune/The Advocate)

How Oil Companies Avoided Environmental Accountability After 10.8 Million Gallons Spilled
Joan Meiners, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate
Meiners writes: "In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, while stranded New Orleanians flagged down helicopters from rooftops and hospitals desperately triaged patients, crude oil silently gushed from damaged drilling rigs and storage tanks."
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