12 Apr
News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective
Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.


Op-ed: The Polish government’s attempt to emphasize the issue of Poles who saved Jews can be seen as a trick aimed at clearing the Poles’ conscience. On the other hand, the efforts to glorify the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust can also be seen as a source of great national pride and a message to the young generation.
In a series of special events, Poland recently marked the “national remembrance day for Poles who saved Jews during the German occupation.” The law, establishing the memorial day as a “national holiday” for all intents and purposes, was initiated by President Andrzej Duda and approved in the following weeks in swift legislation by the two houses of the Polish parliament with votes from both the coalition and the opposition.
The date—March 24—was selected to mark the day in 1944 in which the Nazis murdered eight members of the Ulma family, two adults and six children, who hid eight Jews in their home. Those Jews were also murdered. They were all turned over to the Germans by a polish policeman.
In 1995, Yad Vashem added the Ulma family to the Righteous Among the Nations list. The family lived in the village of Markowa in southeastern Poland, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. Before World War II, the village had 120 Jewish residents. About 30 of them survived the Holocaust after finding shelter (usually for money) with local peasant families.
The Auschwitz death camp. Some 250,000 Jews who fled the ghettos, the trains and the death camps were turned over to the Nazis by Polish people, and thousands were murdered by their neighbors (Photo: AP)
The Polish government, led by the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party, inaugurated in Markowa in 2016 the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II. The museum, which has a Hebrew-language website, was the center of the ceremonies and conferences marking rescue day. Independent Polish historians have criticized the museum display for being one-sided and ignoring the persecutions, extraditions and murders of Jews in the area.
The remembrance day for Poles who saved Jews was led by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which is combination of a research institute, an archive and a legal practice. Among other things, IPN produced a video about the Polish acts of heroism in saving Jews, distributed learning material for schools and prepared a mobile exhibition about the ?egota organization, the Polish Council to Aid Jews, which operated as a secret arm of the Polish national resistance and the state’s army. The Polish postal company issued a special stamp with the portrait of Irena Sendler, a Polish woman who saved many Jewish children and was recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations.
Some 3.3 million Jews lived on Polish territory before World War II broke out; 50,000 of them survived the Holocaust. Half a million Jews lived in the capital of Warsaw; 98 percent of them were murdered in the Holocaust and in the revolt, and 2 percent survived. There was no other ghetto like the one the Nazis built in Warsaw in any other city in occupied Europe.
Jewish Canadian historian Gunnar S. Paulsson estimated in his controversial book “Secret City” that some 80,000 Poles in the Warsaw area had been directly or indirectly involved in aiding Jews. Many historians believe the number is radically exaggerated, and that “only several thousand noble and brave Poles” operated in occupied Warsaw, as Prof. Havi Dreifuss has stated.
Polish President Duda apologizes to Jews driven out in anti-Semitic incidents (Photo: EPA)
Nearly 6,700 Poles have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nation, according to strict Yad Vashem criteria, including the condition of not taking any money or cash equivalents for the rescue. But since the reality in the days of the Nazi occupation in Poland was very complex, it’s impossible to make clear distinctions between humanitarian and material motives. The correct number of Poles who saved Jews is therefore higher, but it’s still far from the hundreds of thousands implied by the modern rewriters of Polish history.
Some 250,000 Jews who fled the ghettos, the trains and the death camps were turned over to the Nazis by Polish people, and thousands were murdered by their neighbors.
The Polish government’s attempt to emphasize the issue of Poles who saved Jews can be seen as a distraction and manipulation trick aimed at whitewashing and clearing the Poles’ conscience, presenting Poland as a victim of an international plot, mainly a German-Jewish one. On the other hand, Poland’s efforts to glorify the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust can be seen as a source of great national pride and a moral message to the young generation, a message of sacrificing yourself for your Jewish neighbor.
With all the justified criticism over the law against “slandering Poland,” over the regular replacement of museum directors, over the forgiveness towards anti-Semitic acts, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that 75 years after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Poland is still mercilessly dealing with the open wounds of the Holocaust era and continuously engaging in national-moral self-examination. As far as Poland is concerned, as far as we’re concerned too, that past isn’t over and done with.


Those coerced into confessing are dressed by police, handed a script and given directions on how to deliver lines
Chinese courts have a conviction rate over 99% and cases rely heavily on confessions Photograph: News Media Websites
China must stop airing forced confessions from human rights activists, a campaign group has said in a report that details how detainees are coerced into delivering scripted remarks.
There have been at least 45 forced televised confessions in China since 2013, according to the report from Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO in Asia. The group called on the international community to put pressure on the Chinese government to end the practice and recommended imposing sanctions on executives at China’s state broadcaster, including asset freezes and travel bans.
Those coerced into confessing describe being dressed by police and handed a script they are required to memorise, and even being given directions on how to deliver certain lines or cry on cue, the report says. One person described enduring seven hours of recording for a television piece that ultimately amounted to several minutes. Others reported police ordering retakes of confessions they were unhappy with.
Some occur in jailhouse settings, with the accused wearing an orange prison vest and sometimes seated behind bars, while others are made to look more neutral. The confessions are almost always aired before a formal conviction, violating Chinese law asserting a presumption of innocence.
Chinese courts have a conviction rate over 99% and cases rely heavily on confessions. Five of the 37 people described in the report who have confessed on Chinese television have since publicly retracted their confessions.
Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 there has been a wholesale crackdown on civil society and dissent, leading to hundreds of arrests targeting human rights activists and the lawyers that defend them. The practice of forced confessions was especially prominent during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, a decade of political upheaval during which “counter-revolutionaries” were paraded through the streets and forced to confess to their alleged crimes.
“[The police] threatened that if I did not cooperate with them they would sentence me to jail time, I’d lose my job, my family would leave me and I’d lose my reputation for the rest of my life,” said one person quoted in the report, identified only as Li. “I was only 39 years old, my hair turned white with the enormous pressure and torture of it all.”
Peter Dahlin, a former China-based NGO worker from Sweden, was forced to say he had violated Chinese law in a televised confession in 2016. He said the purpose, especially when foreigners were involved, was to shape the conversation from the beginning and preempt any international criticism.
“This goes to show this is not done simply by police for murky propaganda purposes but directly by the state as a part of foreign policy,” he said.
Confessions by a range of suspects have been aired on China Central Television, the nation’s official broadcaster, including those by a British corporate investigator, a Chinese-born Swedish book publisher and dozens of Chinese activists who agitated for change.
Gui Minhai, the bookseller, has been paraded in front of media outlets on three separate occasions. He went missing from his apartment in a Thai resort town in late 2015 only to reappear months later in a Chinese jail, confessing to a traffic incident from 2003.

World Politics
United States
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More than 800 ‘emergency’ rallies around the country prepared
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Protests also triggered if Trump replaces deputy attorney general
Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Photograph: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
More than 300,000 people have pledged to attend “rapid response” protests across the US, should Donald Trump fire special counsel Robert Mueller.
The activist website MoveOn said it had more than 800 “emergency” rallies around the country prepared if Trump dismisses Mueller, who is investigating whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Activists would spring into action within hours, MoveOn said, marching in cities and towns in each of the 50 states. The mass protest would also be triggered if Trump moved to replace the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein – which could clear a path for Mueller to be fired – or if Trump pardoned key witnesses in the Russia investigation.
As Trump has stepped up his criticism of the special counsel in recent weeks, MoveOn said people had flooded to its website to sign up for rapid response rallies.
Since 17 March, when Trump publicly criticized Mueller for the first time, more than 100,000 have pledged to attend events. MoveOn launched the sign-up section of its website in August 2017, and is being supported by a slew of activist organizations including Indivisible and Women’s March.
“We’ve seen another explosion of interest in these events over the last few weeks, reflecting the heightened threat that Trump may actually move to end the investigations,” said David Sievers, campaign director at MoveOn.
When Trump mused on Monday – after an FBI team had raided the offices of his longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen – that “many people” had told him he should fire Mueller, it sparked another surge of sign-ups. More than 20,000 people signed up in the two following days alone.
MoveOn set out how the emergency rallies would take place in a detailed plan on its website.
If Trump moved to fire Mueller before 2pm local time activists would spring into action at 5pm that same day. If the president dismissed Muller later than that protests would begin at midday the day after.
The president, in a rare show of discipline, had refrained from directly mentioning Mueller by name for months until his 17 March outburst.
“The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime,” Trump tweeted. The next day he accused “the Mueller team” of having “13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans”.
Since then he has repeatedly attacked Mueller, and on Tuesday White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said Trump had been advised that he could fire Mueller and “certainly believes he has the power to do so”.


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