Chris Hedges's Blog, page 553

25,000 Have Fled Fighting in Yemen, U.N. Says

SANAA, Yemen—The U.N. spokesman said on Monday that tens of thousands of residents have fled the fighting along Yemen’s western coastline where Yemeni fighters backed by a Saudi-led coalition are engaged in fierce battles with Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.

Stephane Dujarric, the spokesman for the U.N. Secretary-General, told reporters on Monday that about 5,200 families, or around 26,000 people, have fled the fighting and sought safety within their own districts or in other areas in Hodeida governorate.

“The number is expected to increase as hostilities continue,” he said.

Emirati troops, along with irregular and loyalist forces in Yemen, have been fighting against Houthis for Hodeida since Wednesday. Coalition warplanes rained missiles and bombs on Houthi positions near Hodeida airport, in the city’s south.

The offensive for Hodeida has faced criticism from international aid groups, who fear a protracted fight could force a shutdown of the city’s port and potentially tip millions into starvation. Some 70 percent of Yemen’s food enters via the port, as well as the bulk of humanitarian aid and fuel supplies. Around two-thirds of the country’s population of 27 million relies on aid and 8.4 million are already at risk of starving.

Dujarric also said that U.N. Special Envoy in Yemen Martin Griffiths will be giving a briefing to the Security Council from Sanaa. Griffiths arrived on Saturday and aims at avoiding an all-out-assault in Hodeida.

The campaign to seize control of Hodeida threatens to worsen Yemen’s humanitarian situation, as Hodeida’s port is the country’s main entry point for most humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, witnesses said that Yemen’s Houthi rebels have shelled a village in the center of the country, killing at least eight civilians and wounding 15.

Residents said that the rebels bombarded the Haglan Maris village late Sunday, and that most of the dead belong to one family. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of security fears.

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Trump Directs Pentagon to Create ‘Space Force’

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—Vowing to reclaim U.S. leadership in space, President Donald Trump announced Monday he is directing the Pentagon to create a new “Space Force” as an independent service branch aimed at ensuring American supremacy in space.

Trump envisioned a bright future for the U.S. space program, pledging to revive the country’s flagging efforts, return to the moon and eventually send a manned mission that would reach Mars. The president framed space as a national security issue, saying he does not want “China and Russia and other countries leading us.”

“My administration is reclaiming America’s heritage as the world’s greatest spacefaring nation,” Trump said in the East Room, joined by members of his space council. “The essence of the American character is to explore new horizons and to tame new frontiers.”

Trump had previously suggested the possibility of creating a space unit that would include portions equivalent to parts of the Air Force, Army and Navy. But his directive will task the Defense Department to begin the process of establishing the ‘Space Force’ as the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces. He said the new branch’s creation will be overseen by Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space,” Trump said. He added: “We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal.”

The president also used the White House event to establish a new policy for reducing satellite clutter in space. The policy calls for providing a safe and secure environment up in orbit, as satellite traffic increases. It also sets up new guidelines for satellite design and operation, to avoid collisions and spacecraft breakups.

Trump was joined by Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the recently revived space council, as well as several Cabinet members, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, retired astronauts and scientists.

The council’s executive secretary, Scott Pace, told reporters before the meeting that space is becoming increasingly congested and current guidelines are inadequate to address the challenge.

___

Associated Press writer Ken Thomas in Washington contributed to this report.

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Why All Americans Should Have an Account at the Fed

A radical proposal could be the answer to securing Americans’ financial futures; a new study shows that the most effective way to convince people of something is through charts; meanwhile, youngsters resist dissidence for a number of reasons, but one of the most impactful might surprise you. These discoveries and more below.

Give Everyone Government Bank Accounts

A radical new idea from two former Obama officials could revolutionize the way Americans manage their money.

Canada’s Best Weapon in a U.S. Trade-War: Invalidating U.S. Pharma Patents

As the US-Canada trade war heats up, Canada finds itself in an asymmetrical battle, vastly overmatched against a country with an order of magnitude population advantage.

We Won’t Stop Filming, We Won’t Stop Writing

The Knesset could act not just against the press, but against human rights groups and Palestinians, the last witnesses for the prosecution against the occupation.

No Such Thing as Socialist Zionism

The historic contradictions of the Zionist left are being played out in the death throes of Meretz, writes Tony Greenstein.

Charts Change Hearts and Minds Better Than Words Do

People believe the craziest things.

The Next Trend In Travel Is … Don’t.

Tourism can destroy environments and drive out local residents. It’s time to rethink the purpose of travel.

The Age Gap in Religion Around the World

Recent surveys have found that younger adults are far less likely than older generations to identify with a religion, believe in God or engage in a variety of religious practices.

Another Reason Young Americans Don’t Revolt Against Being Screwed

The Internet creates fears, lowers self-esteem, and divides millennials—all of which weakens their capacity to resist injustices.

The Fight for the Right to Be Cremated by Water

“Aquamation,” a greener form of body disposal, is gaining acceptance in America. But some powerful groups are fighting to stop it.

Who Are LGBTQ Americans? Here’s A Major Poll On Life, Sex, and Politics.

BuzzFeed News and Whitman Insight Strategies conducted one of the most comprehensive national polls to date on how LGBTQ Americans live in 2018.

Hundreds of Israelis Demonstrate Against Home Sale to Arab Family

The town’s mayor joined protest, saying that ‘the residents of Afula don’t want a mixed city, but rather a Jewish city, and it’s their right. This is not racism.’

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Six Dictators Who Divided Children From Parents

Separating children from their parents, as Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions and their Myrmidons are doing, is monstrous and has been characteristic of the biggest dictators of the modern era. Here are a few cases, in case you don’t believe me:

1. Joseph Stalin’s police used to designate some Soviet citizens as “enemies of the people” and then would take their children from those families. Some so designated who had their families confiscated were Jews.

2. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s and 1980s: Every family that lived in the cities was forced by Khmer Rouge soldiers to work in the fields in the countryside. This was the time in which husbands and wives, mothers, fathers and their children, and brothers and sisters were all separated from each other.

3. Under Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, Catholic hospitals were encouraged to steal babies from leftist families at the hospital, telling the parents they were stillborn, and then to give the infants to right-wing families to raise.

4. Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, expelled tens of thousands of Iraqis of Iranian heritage. In some instances, Saddam kept the children but expelled the parents.

5. The Myanmar military junta has separated Muslim children from their families, as part of the ongoing attempt by the Buddhists to expel the Muslims.

6 And, yes, Hitler separated children from their families on a large scale. In some instances, he had children with blonde hair and blue eyes born into “Slavic” families kidnapped and given to a German family to raise as Aryans.

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Et Tu, Bernie?

There are two versions of Bernie Sanders. There is the old Bernie Sanders, who mounted a quixotic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination as a democratic socialist who refused corporate cash and excoriated corporate Democrats. And there is the new Bernie Sanders, who dutifully plays by the party’s rules, courts billionaires, refused to speak out in support of the lawsuit brought against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for rigging the primaries against him and endorses Democratic candidates who espouse the economic and political positions he once denounced.

Sanders’ metamorphosis began in December 2015 when he saw the groundswell of support for his candidacy and thought he could win the nomination. He dropped the fiery, socialist rhetoric that first characterized his campaign—he had given whole speeches on democratic socialism shortly after he announced his candidacy in May 2015. He hired establishment Democratic Party consultants such as Ted Devine, who, ironically, played a role in the creation of the superdelegates that helped fix the nomination victory of Hillary Clinton. He would spend tens of millions of the some $230 million he raised during the campaign on professional consultants. When it was clear he would lose, Sanders and his influential campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, began coordinating closely with the Clinton campaign. By May of 2016, Sanders had muted his criticisms of Clinton and surrendered to the Democratic Party machine. He has been an obedient servant of the party establishment ever since.

Sanders was always problematic. His refusal to condemn imperialism and the war industry—a condemnation central to the message of the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs—meant his socialism was stillborn. It is impossible to be a socialist without being an anti-imperialist. But at least Sanders addressed the reality of social inequality, which the Republican and Democratic establishment pretended did not exist. He returned political discourse to reality. And he restored the good name of socialism.

Weaver and Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, built a de facto alliance in the weeks leading up to the convention. As the convention was about to begin, WikiLeaks exposed the Clinton campaign’s nonaggression pact with the Sanders campaign. Many Sanders delegates, by the time they arrived in Philadelphia in July 2016 for the convention, were enraged at the theft and fraud orchestrated by the DNC. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair and the architect of the theft, stepped down. Some DNC staff members were fired.

Sanders delegates were deluged on the eve of the convention with messages from the Sanders campaign to be respectful, not to disrupt the nominating process and to support Clinton, messages that often turned out to have been written by Clinton staffers such as Mook and then sent out under Sanders’ name. Sanders was a dutiful sheepdog, herding his disgruntled supporters into the embrace of the Democratic Party machine.

The scope of fraud in the primaries was breathtaking. Donna Brazile, who took over the DNC after Wasserman Schultz was removed, later revealed the existence of a joint fund-raising agreement among the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

“The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Clinton would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised,” Brazile wrote. “Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”

Sanders, although he knew by September 2016 that the process was rigged, said nothing to his supporters. He was tacitly complicit in the cover-up. It was left to one of the architects of the fraud, Brazile, to reveal the scam. But by then it was too late.

Sanders’ capitulation in the face of the overwhelming evidence of the rigging of the nomination process was political and moral cowardice. He missed his historical moment, one that should have seen him denounce a corrupt, corporate-dominated party elite and walk away to build a third-party candidacy. Sanders will never recover politically. To see the future, he has only to look at the campaign events he held on behalf of Clinton after her nomination. His crowds dwindled from thousands to a few hundred after he endorsed Clinton. Data collected by Harvard Harris Poll charted the downward spiral of his favorability ratings as he became more and more obsequious to the Democratic Party establishment. His 2020 campaign for the presidency will be a pale reflection of 2016. His “political revolution” slogan has been exposed as another empty public relations gimmick.

If we are to defy corporate power, which is vicious when it feels threatened, we need leaders with the fortitude to withstand the onslaught. Debs never sold out. He was sent to prison in 1919 and ran for president in 1920 from his prison cell. If we are not willing to pay this price we better not play the game.

“There is but one thing you have to be concerned about, and that is that you keep foursquare with the principles of the international Socialist movement,” Debs said in a June 16, 1918, speech in Canton, Ohio, that led to his being sentenced to 10 years in prison on a charge of violating the Espionage Act. “It is only when you begin to compromise that trouble begins. So far as I am concerned, it does not matter what others may say, or think, or do, as long as I am sure that I am right with myself and the cause. There are so many who seek refuge in the popular side of a great question. As a Socialist, I have long since learned how to stand alone.”

Those who support Sanders’ capitulation, including his high-priced establishment consultants, will argue that politics is about compromise and the practical. This is true. But playing politics in a system that is not democratic is about becoming part of the charade. We need to overthrow this system, not placate it. Revolution is almost always a doomed enterprise, one that succeeds only because its leaders eschew the practical and are endowed with what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr calls “sublime madness.” Sanders lacks this sublime madness. The quality defined Debs. And for this reason Sanders is morally and temperamentally unfit to lead this fight.

“I never had much faith in leaders,” Debs said. “I am willing to be charged with almost anything, rather than to be charged with being a leader. I am suspicious of leaders, and especially of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day in the week. If you go to the city of Washington, and you examine the pages of the Congressional Directory, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of Congress, and misrepresentatives of the masses—you will find that almost all of them claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.”

Heather Gautney, the author of “Crashing the Party: From the Bernie Sanders Campaign to a Progressive Movement” and an associate professor of sociology at Fordham University, has detailed the numerous ploys used by the Democratic Party establishment to deny Sanders the nomination. These tactics included the party elites’ appointment of 718 superdelegates—Democratic senators, governors and members of Congress, party officials, dozens of registered lobbyists or “shadow lobbyists” and wealthy corporate donors. More than 400 were pledged to Clinton before Sanders announced his campaign. The party also banned those who were registered as independent voters from voting in many primaries, although the taxpayers pay for the primaries. It orchestrated the theft of the vote in caucuses such as Nevada’s. And it limited the number of debates to deny exposure to Sanders. Brazile passed on the CNN debate questions in advance to the Clinton campaign.

“Over a third of under-30 voters—Sanders’s core constituency—weren’t registered to any political party,” Gautney writes in an article in The Guardian. And when they got to the polls they were turned away. In the New York primary, she notes, “between 3 and 4 million ‘unaffiliated’ voters were disenfranchised due to a statute that required changing one’s party affiliation 25 days prior to the previous general election.”

The Democratic Party in New York in the upcoming primary requires unaffiliated voters to register as Democrats 11 months before the primary, a condition that will cripple the progressive candidacy of Cynthia Nixon for governor. Sanders, bowing to the demands of the party elite, has refused to endorse Nixon’s bid against Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Gautney calls the system broken, but it works exactly as it is designed to work. The Democratic Party elites have been refining the mechanisms and exclusionary rules since the presidential election, along with purging the party of progressives, to ensure that an insurgent candidate like Sanders will never get close to the nomination. Sanders, no doubt, thinks he can overcome these obstacles by being obedient to the party hierarchy. This is a terrible miscalculation.

In state after state, as Gautney details, Sanders was systematically robbed. And he and any other insurgent can expect the same treatment in 2020. Yes, the party formed a tripartite Unity Reform Commission with representatives from the Clinton campaign and the Sanders campaign to review the rules. But the Unity Reform Commission is cosmetic. It cannot make changes to DNC rules, only recommendations, which have to be approved by the rules and bylaws committee and the DNC members. The rules and bylaws committee and the DNC are stacked with lobbyists, consultants, establishment and Clinton loyalists, and people, like Brazile, who rigged the election against Sanders. They retain control over any changes to the rules. The public has no say. There is not one Sanders supporter on the committee. The final recommendations submitted by the commission said nothing about the chief source of corruption that grips the Democratic Party—corporate and billionaire money. It didn’t mention campaign finance reform. Any attempt at reform is meaningless until corporations and billionaires stop bankrolling the party.

The Democratic Party is neither democratic nor in any real sense a political party. It is a corporate mirage. The members of its base can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props in a choreographed party convention. Voters have zero influence on party politics.

“I’ll never forget watching the primary votes being counted for Michigan, one of the key states that decided the 2016 election,” Gautney wrote in The Guardian. “Sanders’ ‘pledged delegate count’—which reflected the number of votes he received from rank-and-file Democrats—exceeded Clinton’s by four. But after the superdelegates cast their ballots, the roll call registered ‘Clinton 76, Sanders 67.’ ”

“In Indiana, Sanders won the vote 44 to 39, but, after the super delegates had their say, Clinton was granted 46 delegates, versus Sanders’ 44,” she wrote. “In New Hampshire, where Sanders won the vote by a gaping margin (60% to 38%) and set a record for the largest number of votes ever, the screen read ‘16 Sanders, 16 Clinton.’ ”

Sanders, who calls himself an independent, caucuses as a Democrat. The Democratic Party determines his assignments in the Senate. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who oversees Wall Street campaign donations to Democratic candidates, offered to make Sanders the head of the Senate Budget Committee if the Democrats won control of the Senate, in exchange for the Vermont senator’s support of Clinton and the hawkish, corporate neoliberal Democratic candidates running for the House and Senate. Sanders, swallowing whatever pride he has left, is now a loyal party apparatchik, squandering his legacy and his integrity. He routinely sends out appeals to raise money for party-selected candidates, including the 2016 Democratic senatorial candidates Katie McGinty in Pennsylvania, Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire, Ted Strickland in Ohio and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada. Sanders made a blanket endorsement of every Democrat running in the 2017 election, including the worst corporate Democrats.

There was about $6 million left from the Sanders campaign, and it was used to form an organization called Our Revolution in August 2016. The organization was set up ostensibly to fund and support progressive candidates. It was soon taken over by Weaver, who ensured that it was not registered as a political action committee (PAC), a group that can give money directly to campaigns. It was set up as a 501(c)(4), a group prohibited from having direct contact with candidates and giving donations directly to candidates. The 501(c)(4) status allowed it to take and mask donations from wealthy donors such as Tom Steyer. Sanders’ decision to quietly solicit contributions from the billionaire oligarchs who funded the Hillary Clinton campaign and control the Democratic Party betrayed the core promise of his campaign. Yet, even as he created a mechanism to take money from wealthy donors he continued to write at the bottom of his emails “Paid for by Bernie Sanders, not the billionaires.”

Eight of the 13 staffers of Our Revolution resigned in protest. The organization is now adding a PAC.

Meanwhile, the DNC rules and bylaws committee has recommended a rule that any candidate in a primary be required to demonstrate he or she is a “faithful” Democrat. This loyalty test, intentionally vague, gives the DNC, which will consider the rule change in August, the power to disqualify candidates and block them from appearing on the ballot. If the party elites feel threatened, they can nuke any candidacy, including one mounted by Sanders, before it even begins.

The Democratic Party elites in an open process and without corporate backing would not be in power. They are creations of the corporate state. They are not about to permit reforms that will see themselves toppled. Yes, this tactic of fixing elections and serving corporate power may ensure a second term for Donald Trump and election of fringe candidates who pledge their loyalty to Trump, but the Democratic elites would rather sink the ship of state than give up their first-class cabins.

The Democratic Party is as much to blame for Trump as the Republicans. It is a full partner in the perpetuation of our political system of legalized bribery, along with the deindustrialization of the country, austerity programs, social inequality, mass incarceration and the assault on basic civil liberties. It deregulates Wall Street. It prosecutes the endless and futile wars that are draining the federal budget. We must mount independent political movements and form our own parties to sweep the Democratic and Republican elites aside or be complicit in cementing into place a corporate tyranny. Sanders won’t help us. He has made that clear. We must do it without him.

Hundreds of Children Wait in Cages in Texas Warehouse

McALLEN, Texas—Inside an old warehouse in South Texas, hundreds of children wait away from their parents in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets.

One teenager told an advocate who visited that she was helping care for a young child she didn’t know because the child’s aunt was somewhere else in the facility. She said she had to show others in her cell how to change the girl’s diaper.

The U.S. Border Patrol on Sunday allowed reporters to briefly visit the facility where it holds families arrested at the southern U.S. border, responding to new criticism and protests over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy and resulting separation of families.

More than 1,100 people were inside the large, dark facility that’s divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own, and mothers and fathers with children. The cages in each wing open out into common areas to use portable restrooms. The overhead lighting in the warehouse stay on around the clock.

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Immigrant Protections Eroded After Trump Took Office



by

Reporters were not allowed by agents to interview any of the detainees or take photos.

Nearly 2,000 children have been taken from their parents since Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the policy, which directs Homeland Security officials to refer all cases of illegal entry into the United States for prosecution. Church groups and human rights advocates have sharply criticized the policy, calling it inhumane.

Stories have spread of children being torn from their parents’ arms, and parents not being able to find where their kids have gone. A group of congressional lawmakers visited the same facility Sunday and were set to visit a longer-term shelter holding around 1,500 children — many of whom were separated from their parents.

“Those kids inside who have been separated from their parents are already being traumatized,” said Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who was denied entry earlier this month to children’s shelter. “It doesn’t matter whether the floor is swept and the bedsheets tucked in tight.”

In Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for people trying to enter the U.S., Border Patrol officials argue that they have to crack down on migrants and separate adults from children as a deterrent to others.

“When you exempt a group of people from the law … that creates a draw,” said Manuel Padilla, the Border Patrol’s chief agent here. “That creates the trends right here.”

Agents running the holding facility — generally known as “Ursula” for the name of the street it’s on — said everyone detained is given adequate food, access to showers and laundered clothes, and medical care. People are supposed to move through the facility quickly. Under U.S. law, children are required to be turned over within three days to shelters funded by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Padilla said agents in the Rio Grande Valley have allowed families with children under the age of 5 to stay together in most cases.

An advocate who spent several hours in the facility Friday said she was deeply troubled by what she found.

Michelle Brane, director of migrant rights at the Women’s Refugee Commission, met with a 16-year-old girl who had been taking care of a young girl for three days. The teen and others in their cage thought the girl was 2 years old.

“She had to teach other kids in the cell to change her diaper,” Brane said.

Brane said that after an attorney started to ask questions, agents found the girl’s aunt and reunited the two. It turned out that the girl was actually 4 years old. Part of the problem was that she didn’t speak Spanish, but K’iche, a language indigenous to Guatemala.

“She was so traumatized that she wasn’t talking,” Brane said. “She was just curled up in a little ball.”

Brane said she also saw officials at the facility scold a group of 5-year-olds for playing around in their cage, telling them to settle down. There are no toys or books.

But one boy nearby wasn’t playing with the rest. According to Brane, he was quiet, clutching a piece of paper that was a photocopy of his mother’s ID card.

“The government is literally taking kids away from their parents and leaving them in inappropriate conditions,” Brane said. “If a parent left a child in a cage with no supervision with other 5-year-olds, they’d be held accountable.”

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Rescue Ships Spotlight Europe’s Migrant Debate

VALENCIA, Spain—Ships in the Aquarius aid convoy docked Sunday at the Spanish port of Valencia, ending a weeklong ordeal for hundreds of people who were rescued from the Mediterranean Sea only to become pawns in Europe’s fight over immigration.

The Italian coast guard vessel Dattilo was the first of the three boats bearing the 630 migrants to touch land just before 7 a.m. Sunday. The 270 migrants on board soon began to disembark after medical staff had made a preliminary inspection.

The rescue ship Aquarius came in four hours later with another 106 migrants. Aid workers awaiting their arrival clapped and cheered as the first migrants walked down the gangway. Another Italian navy ship, the Orione, came in shortly after 1 p.m.

The Aquarius, operated by the aid groups SOS Mediterranee Sea and Doctors Without Borders, was stuck off the coast of Sicily on June 9 when Italy’s new populist government refused it permission to dock and demanded that Malta do so. Malta also refused.

After days of bickering and food and water running low on the ship, Spain stepped in and granted the rescue boat entry. The 1,500-kilometer (930-mile) journey across the Mediterranean from Sicily to Valencia took nearly a week.

David Noguera, the head of Doctors Without Borders in Spain, said he was glad Spain allowed the migrants in but he’s worried that more European nations will close their ports to those rescued at sea in the future.

“I have mixed feelings,” Noguera told The Associated Press as the first boat arrived. “I am happy that the journey (for the Aquarius migrants) is over — a journey that was too long — and I am worried for the situation in the Mediterranean and the closing of European ports.”

The migrants were met by emergency workers, health officials, Red Cross volunteers and psychologists at the city’s marina. Each were assigned to a translator and authorities worked to determine their identities before they were sent to welcome centers. The first migrant was a 29-year-old man from South Sudan.

Valencia emergency official Jorge Suarez said some of the migrants were in a state of shock.

“They are very shaken,” Suarez said. “Put yourself in their position, you get off a ship and the first people who greet you are wearing masks.”

He said an examination of the 130 migrants from the Dattilo did not reveal any serious health problems but many passengers showed signs of exposure to high temperatures at sea.

Spanish authorities are examining the migrants on a case-by-case basis to see who may qualify for asylum.

Due to their ordeal, the migrants from the Aquarius have been granted special authorization to remain in Spain for 45 days before they must begin resolving their legal situation.

“We have to strike a balance between our sensibilities and humanity and our respect for the law,” said Spain’s migration minister, Magdalena Valerio.

“These people could not be left adrift in the Mediterranean, where they would face death,” she told Spanish radio Cope. “(The EU) must recognize that it needs an immigration policy that these times require.”

The migrants reportedly include 123 unaccompanied minors, 11 children and as many as seven pregnant women. After Spain invited the Aquarius to land, Italy sent the Dattilo and Orione to help transport the migrants.

Meanwhile, several hundred more migrants were aboard an Italian coast guard vessel off Sicily on Sunday. The passengers came from a series of rescues in recent days, including ones carried out by cargo ships that the Rome-based coordination center asked to aid migrant boats in distress.

They also counted 41 migrants who were taken aboard a U.S. Navy vessel on June 12, survivors of a sunken dinghy. A private aid ship said it couldn’t assume the unexpected passengers from Trenton because Italy wasn’t assigning it a port within its navigational capacity.

The rescued people stayed on the Navy boat for several more days before being transferred to the Italian coast guard vessel on Sunday morning.

The destination wasn’t immediately announced, but the coast guard said it wouldn’t dock until at least Tuesday.

Italy’s new interior minister, Matteo Salvini, thanked Spain for taking in the migrants who reached Valencia and said he wished the country would take in “66,629 more.”

Salvini, who heads the right-wing League party, said that if France, Malta and Portugal also open their ports to migrants rescued from smugglers’ unseaworthy boats, “we’ll be happier.”

The refusal by Italy and Malta to allow the Aquarius to dock has reignited a continentwide battle over how to handle immigration.

Under the EU’s asylum laws — currently the subject of a major political dispute and under revision — migrants must apply for asylum in the country where they first enter Europe. In practice, the policy has placed a heavy burden on Italy and Greece, where hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers have arrived in recent years.

Spain’s new Socialist government has taken up the cause of the migrants to demonstrate its commitment to protecting human rights.

But overall, the European Union’s 28 members have not agreed in the least how to handle the influx of refugees and migrants to Europe. The issue has put strong domestic pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, created a spat between France and Italy, and prompted eastern nations like Hungary and Poland to refuse to take in any migrants.

Immigration will be a top issue at the EU leaders’ June 28-29 summit. In addition, a new populist government in Italy — one whose interior minister has vowed to deport tens of thousands of migrants as soon as he can — will make any compromises on EU migration policy even more difficult.

The warmer weather has caused a spike in migrants taking off from North Africa for Europe. Spain’s maritime rescue service pulled 986 people from 69 small smuggling boats near the Strait of Gibraltar between Friday and Saturday, and also recovered four bodies.

At least 792 migrants have died crossing the Mediterranean so far this year, according to the United Nations. Through the first five months of 2018, some 35,455 migrants reached European shores.

___

Wilson contributed from Barcelona, Spain. Frances D’Emilio contributed from Rome.

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Immigrant Protections Eroded After Trump Took Office

The Trump administration’s move to separate immigrant parents from their children on the U.S.-Mexico border has grabbed attention around the world, drawn scorn from human-rights organizations and overtaken the immigration debate in Congress.

It’s also a situation that has been brewing since the week President Donald Trump took office, when he issued his first order signaling a tougher approach to asylum-seekers. Since then, the administration has been steadily eroding protections for immigrant children and families.

“They’re willing to risk harm to a child being traumatized, separated from a parent and sitting in federal detention by themselves, in order to reach a larger policy goal of deterrence,” said Jennifer Podkul, director of policy at Kids in Need of Defense, which represents children in immigration court.

To those who work with immigrants, the parents’ plight was heralded by a series of measures making it harder for kids arriving on the border to get released from government custody and to seek legal status here.

The administration says the changes are necessary to deter immigrants from coming here illegally. But a backlash is mounting, fueled by reports of children being taken from mothers and distraught toddlers and elementary school age children asking, through tears, when they can see their parents.

About 2,000 children had been separated from their families over a six-week period ending in May, administration officials said Friday.

Among the parents caught up in the new rules is 29-year-old Vilma Aracely Lopez Juc de Coc, who fled her home in a remote Guatemalan village after her husband was beaten to death in February, according to advocates. When she reached the Texas border with her 11-year-old son in May, he was taken from her by border agents, she said.

Her eyes swollen, she cried when she asked a paralegal what she most wanted to know: When could she see her son again?

“She did not know what was going on,” said paralegal Georgina Guzman, recalling their conversation at a federal courthouse in McAllen, Texas.

Similar scenarios play out on a daily basis in federal courtrooms in Texas and Arizona, where dozens of immigrant parents appear on charges of entering the country illegally after traveling up from Central America. More than the legal outcome of their cases, their advocates say, they’re worried about their children.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the administration has issued at least half a dozen orders and changes affecting immigrant children, many of them obscure revisions. The cumulative effect is a dramatic alteration of immigration policy and practice.

The measures require a senior government official to sign off on the release of children from secure shelters and allow immigration enforcement agents access to information about sponsors who sign up to take the children out of government custody and care for them.

The crackdown expanded in April, when the administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy on the border to prosecute immigrants for entering the country illegally in the hopes they could be quickly deported and that the swift deportations would prevent more people from coming.

Parents are now being arrested and placed in quick federal court proceedings near the border. Since children cannot be jailed in federal prisons, they’re placed in shelters that have long existed for unaccompanied immigrant children arriving on the border alone.

The administration insists the new rules are necessary to send a message to immigrants.

“Look, I hope that we don’t have to separate any more children from any more adults,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last week. “But there’s only one way to ensure that is the case: It’s for people to stop smuggling children illegally. Stop crossing the border illegally with your children. Apply to enter lawfully. Wait your turn.”

Immigration on the southwest border has remained high since the zero-tolerance policies took effect. Border agents made more than 50,000 arrests in May, up slightly from a month earlier and more than twice the number in May 2017. About a quarter of arrests were families traveling with children.

In addition to those trying to cross on their own, large crowds of immigrants are gathered at border crossings each day to seek asylum. Some wait days or weeks for a chance to speak with U.S. authorities. On a Texas border bridge, parents and children have been sleeping in sweltering heat for several days awaiting their turn.

Under U.S. law, most Mexican children are sent back across the border. Central American and other minors are taken into government custody before they are mostly released to sponsors in the United States.

The arrival of children fleeing violence in Central America is not new. President Barack Obama faced an even larger surge in border crossings that overflowed shelters and prompted the authorities to release many families. Nearly 60,000 children were placed in government-contracted shelters in the 2014 fiscal year.

Obama administration lawyers argued in federal court in Los Angeles against the separation of parents and children and in favor of keeping in family detention facilities those deemed ineligible for release.

Immigrant and children’s advocates said the new measures are not only cruel but costly. They argued that children fleeing violence and persecution in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras will continue to come to the United States and remain in government custody longer, costing taxpayers more money.

The government pays more than $1 billion a year to care for unaccompanied immigrant children, Sessions has said.

In May 2014, the average length of stay for children in custody was 35 days. So far this fiscal year, it’s taking 56 days for children to be released to sponsors — in most cases, their own relatives.

Many children were released to sponsors who did not have legal immigration status. That’s yet another concern child advocates now have since the Trump administration is requiring fingerprints of sponsors and their household members and will turn that data over to the immigration agency in charge of deportations.

Advocates say the new information sharing might lead some parents to shy away from sponsoring their own children and ask others to do so, a situation that can lead to cases of trafficking or neglect.

Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, legal director of the immigrant advocacy program at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Virginia, said he’s never worked with immigrants who said U.S. policies influenced their decision to move. They are fleeing violence and persecution, and he doesn’t see that changing even if the government deports parents.

“Look six months out from now,” he said. “Are these moms going to stay in Guatemala? Hell no, they’re going to come back looking for their kids.”

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Saudis, U.S. Ignore Famine Warning in Besieged Yemen

Ignoring international aid groups’ warnings that an attack on the Yemeni city of Hodeida, which is held by Houthi rebels, could exacerbate hunger in an impoverished and war-torn nation already on the brink of famine, Saudi-led U.S.-backed coalition forces continued a sweeping assault on the Red Sea port city Saturday, reportedly seizing control of an airport.

Since the fighting started earlier this week, thousands of Hodeida’s 600,000 civilians have evacuated and hundreds of people have been killed. The port city is the main conduit through which about 70 percent of international aid reaches Yemenis, many of whom are battling starvation and outbreaks of infectious diseases such as cholera.

The Norwegian Refugee Council’s office in Yemen told Reuters that “humanitarian agencies cannot currently access areas south of the city where people are most likely to have been injured, affected, and displaced, leaving us without a clear picture of needs.”

“The lack of humanitarian assistance, following suspension of aid programs and with limited NGO staff on the ground while a military offensive is ongoing, will have severe consequences on a region already facing restrictions on the import and internal transportation of vital supplies, including medicines, food, and fuel,” Frederic Pelat, head of Médecins Sans Frontières’ mission in Yemen, warned Thursday. “Yemenis living in the northern parts of the country depend on vital supplies that pass through Hodeida’s port.”

“With the intensification of fighting around #Hodeida, I am deeply concerned about the impact it will have on the lives, health and welfare of the 1.6 million people living in the city and its environs, and on the people of #Yemen more broadly”- @DrTedros https://t.co/KB9c3d50aH pic.twitter.com/OgONNVtkbf

— WHO Yemen (@WHOYemen) June 16, 2018

Martin Griffiths, the U.N. special envoy to Yemen, arrived in the Houthi-held capital Sana’a on Saturday after the U.S. and U.K. blocked a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have called on coalition forces—which are being led by the United Arab Emirates in Hodeida—to immediately implement a ceasefire due to mounting fears that if the coalition takes control of Hodeida, the majority of Yemenis will be cut off from humanitarian assistance.

In an article published by The Intercept on Saturday, former White House and State Department officials, humanitarian leaders, and Yemen experts characterized the coalition’s operation in Hodeida “as a major failure by the U.S. to restrain its coalition partners, who are largely dependent on American weapons, intelligence, and logistical support,” and suggested “the attack was a sign that the U.S. is allowing allies like Saudi Arabia and the UAE to drive American policy decisions in Yemen.”

Kate Kizer, policy director at the D.C. advocacy group Win Without War, noted that “rather than preventing the offensive, which the U.S. has done twice before, [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo [released] a weak statement giving the UAE the green light to potentially kill hundreds of thousands of people with no political strategy or end goal.”

“The UAE’s assault on Hodeida is just another example of the Trump administration outsourcing U.S. policy in Yemen—and really the region writ large—to the Gulf states,” Kizer concluded. “Believing that this offensive will bring the Houthis to the negotiating table is living in a fantasyland.”

On Friday, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) sent a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis that acknowledged reports that the U.S. denied the UAE’s request for “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” support for the Hodeida operation but still demanded answers about the U.S. military’s ongoing assistance to the Saudi-led coalition.

.@SenMikeLee and I call on Sec. Mattis to immediately disclose the full extent of the U.S. military role in the Saudi-led war against Yemen’s Houthis and issue a public declaration opposing the impending assault on Hodeida. https://t.co/jZx5G2Je7i

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) June 15, 2018

The senators wrote,

We call on you to immediately disclose the full extent of the U.S. military role in the Saudi-led war against Yemen’s Houthis, including the use of special operations forces; disclose any role that the Pentagon is currently performing, has been asked to perform, or is considering performing regarding an attack on the port of Hodeida; and issue a public declaration opposing this impending assault and restating the administration’s position that Saudi Arabia and other parties to the conflict should accept an immediate ceasefire and move toward a political settlement to resolve the conflict.

Their letter on Friday followed a similar memo sent last month, which went unanswered, as well as a War Powers Resolution that the pair of senators, along with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), introduced earlier this year. While dozens of lawmakers were lauded by peace groups for backing that measure, which would have withdrawn U.S. forces from the war in Yemen, it was ultimately voted down by a majority of the Senate in late March.

In spite of that setback, anti-war advocates continue to push for congressional action to stop U.S. support for the war in Yemen:

Yemen. Can’t. Wait.

Send a message to your Representative to act now to stop it from getting even worse: https://t.co/D9xKU0PwWt https://t.co/gRbdGg5OLA

— CODEPINK (@codepink) June 16, 2018

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Demise of Dinosaurs May Serve as a Guide for Today

U.S. geologists have identified the moment of the dinosaurs’ death in the Earth’s deep past as the time when the climate changed, even faster and more severely than it is changing as a consequence of human action.

That fateful moment occurred on the day around 65 million years ago when a vast comet or asteroid smashed into Earth over what is now Chicxulub in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and brought the Cretaceous era to a close.

The scientists used tiny bits of fish scales, teeth and bones to compose a temperature chart for the last 50,000 years of the Cretaceous, and the first 100,000 years of the Palaeogene, when planet Earth changed forever.

The planetary average temperatures rose around 5°C [9 F] and stayed perilously hotter for at least another 100,000 years, and in the course of this the last dinosaurs disappeared, as if violently wiped out in one short episode.

Theorists predict that an impact with something 10kms [6 miles] or so across arriving at a minimum of 20 kms a second would have delivered a ferocious blast of heat, a huge ejection of rock and dust into the upper atmosphere, a darkening of the skies, an all-year-round winter that might have endured for a decade, and then dramatic warming as the air filled with carbon dioxide from blazing forests around the planet.

The researchers report in the journal Science that they see this fateful celestial traffic accident as “an unusually relevant natural experiment to compare to modern climatic and environmental changes.”

The evidence comes from a series of shallow marine marls deposited 65 million years ago in what is now Tunisia: these strata contain fragments of fish, and the phosphate compounds in the hard fragments contain oxygen isotopes that in turn can answer questions about the atmospheric temperatures at the time the ancient fish swam in ancient oceans.

And in this series of sediments is a thin red layer rich in the kind of evidence to be expected from a colossal impact with an interplanetary fireball.

No Abrupt Cooling

What the scientists did not find was evidence of a sudden, brief dramatic cooling, but they didn’t expect to. But they did find, they say, evidence that “matches expectations for impact-initiated greenhouse warming.”

The impact probably extinguished three fourths of all life on Earth. As so often happens in research, a second, almost simultaneous study in a different publication of a different series of geological sediments – in North Dakota in the US – yielded more details about the Cretaceous calamity.

Plant fossils, pollen and spores, according to a report in the journal Current Biology, confirm indirectly that not only were the world’s forests incinerated during and after the impact, but perhaps all tree-dwelling birds of the time.

Today’s finches, falcons and guinea fowl all seem on separate evidence to have evolved from the ancestors of the kiwi, the ostrich, the cassowary and other ground-dwellers.

Because Earth is a once-only experiment, the only lessons for how climate change happens without human help are to be found in the deep past. But the past is a mysterious and sometimes enigmatic landscape.

Modern Speed-up

Climate change happens because of tectonic plate movements, or shifts in planetary orbit, or dramatic losses of oxygen in the oceans, but these changes often happen imperceptibly, over very long periods.

But the change associated with the human expansion and the profligate combustion of fossil fuels – sometimes called the Great Acceleration – in the last 200 years is far, far faster.

Thanks to evidence from the last days of the Cretaceous, though, climate scientists have found an accelerated change even faster than anything humans have yet managed.

So the latest study provides, the scientists say, “a perspective on the response of Earth systems to extremely rapid global perturbations.” So far, that is all it provides: a perspective. There are many more questions to be settled before the dying convulsions of the dinosaurs become a model for what might happen to humanity in the coming century.

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