28 Jul
News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective
News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective
English Online International Newspapers
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.
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Opinion For me, heroine Elin Ersson can’t protest too much
Remember Edmund Burke’s warning, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
One is drawn the video of the Swedish student trying to prevent a deportation.
Elin Ersson: ‘I think we can do better, especially in a rich country like Sweden.’ Photograph: Facebook
It’s rare I watch a video on Facebook to the end. My online attention span has been whittled to a husk by a crowd-pleasing parade of clips of babies doing funny things with peanut butter and dogs being very good boys, and there are only so many seconds of that before you get the idea. But when I clicked on the video of Elin Ersson halting the deportation of an Afghan asylum seeker from Sweden on a flight to Turkey, I watched right until the final moments. Then I watched it again. I found that I had something in my eye.
When a British man, annoyed by the delay to his flight, began to tell Ersson to sit down, that she was frightening children – I know who I would have found more intimidating – I thought I knew how the story would go. Instead, there was a surprise ending. The subsequent debate about her actions has followed the same pattern as it did on the plane. Some passengers were irritated, but others offered their support. The flight attendant got her phone back when the British man took it away. You can hear another man telling her that what she’s doing is right. Towards the end of the clip, a football team at the rear stands up. The kindness makes Ersson cry. The asylum seeker was taken off the plane and Ersson has used the focus on her to ask people to question how we treat refugees. “I think we can do better, especially in a rich country like Sweden,” she said.
Another protest, less noble, perhaps, but similarly calm and measured, took place on Fox News on Monday. Morning show Fox & Friends had invited Ann Kirkpatrick, a Democratic congressional candidate in Arizona, to discuss her support for the immigration-enforcement agency ICE. But it accidentally booked Massachusetts state senator Barbara L’Italien instead. L’Italien took the slot without correcting them. “I’m actually here to speak directly to Donald Trump,” she began, then launched into an eloquent attack on border separations of families. After giving her more than enough time to make her point, the confused hosts splutter: “Who is this?” and she’s cut off. “I’ve always fought for vulnerable people,” L’Italien said, later, on Twitter.
Like Ersson’s commitment to standing up, L’Italien took her chance to do the right thing. To watch both acts of protest, in favour of decency, against inhumanity, was a glass of cold water on a stifling hot day.
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Save the Children report claims young girls exposed to risks of abuse and exploitation
A demonstration in support of migrants in Ventimiglia. The town is a major transit hub for migrants attempting to cross into France, Photograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images
Migrant children are prostituting themselves in order to get a safe passage into France from the Italian border, according to a report from Save the Children Italy. The minors, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, are selling sex if they are unable to pay the €50-€150 asked by drivers in exchange for a lift across the border.
The children are also being offered food or shelter in return for sex. The charity says it has evidence of many cases, particularly since the beginning of this year.
“These are very young, and particularly at-risk girls, who are among the invisible flow of unaccompanied migrant minors in transit at the northern Italian border who, in an attempt to reunite with their relatives or acquaintances in other European countries, are deprived of the opportunity to travel safely and legally,” Raffaela Milano, the director of Italy-Europe programmes at Save the Children, said in the report.
She added that the girls “are strongly exposed to very serious risks of abuse and exploitation” and in many cases find themselves living in conditions “of great degradation”.
The situation in the Italian border town of Ventimiglia, a major transit hub for migrants attempting to cross into France, was aggravated after a makeshift camp by the Roya river was cleared in April. Since then, migrant children had been forced to live on the streets in “degrading, promiscuous and dangerous conditions”, the report said.
The report said migrant children were also being exploited for sex in other parts of Italy, including in Rome and the regions of Veneto, Abruzzo and Marche, as well as the island of Sardinia.
The charity said more than 1,900 girls had been sexually exploited across the areas between January 2017 and March 2018, out of which it was proven that 160 were children. The report said the rest had either recently reached the age of 18 or were pretending to be adults.
“It is unacceptable that in our country children and adolescents end up in the network of unscrupulous exploiters,” added Milano.
The report follows an Oxfam report in Junethat accused French border police of illegally sending migrant children back to Italy. They were also accused of detaining children as young as 12 in cells without food or water, cutting the soles off their shoes so they did not try to attempt the journey again, and stealing Sim cards from their mobile phones.
Oxfam said at least 16,500 migrants, a quarter of them children, had passed through Ventimiglia in the nine months to April.
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World Politics
United States
As ever more voters are delisted, no part of the US is immune from purges – but every eligible American deserves the right to vote
‘No one should allow these challenges to prevent them from casting a ballot.’ Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
In every American election there are some voters who show up to their polling place ready to cast a ballot, only to find their name isn’t on the registration list. The reason? Voter purges, an often flawed effort to update voter rolls by removing voters’ names from registration lists. Virginians fell victim in 2013, when nearly 39,000 voters were removed when the state relied on faulty data to determine which names should be deleted. In 2016 it was New Yorkers, when the New York City board of elections wrongly deleted more than 200,000 names.
No area of America is immune, as purges have grown against the backdrop of a controversial supreme court decision in 2013 that gutted federal protections for voters. In fact, a new Brennan Center report found that purges could threaten the right to vote for millions in November.
Purges have increased particularly in a handful of largely southern states which were freed from oversight by the supreme court’s landmark 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder. Before Shelby County, areas around the country with histories of racial discrimination in voting were prohibited from making election changes without first showing that the change would not make minority voters worse off, or that the change was not enacted with that purpose.
Had purge rates continued in these areas at the same pace as rates in jurisdictions not subject to preclearance at that time, 2 million fewer voters would have been deleted from voter rolls between the elections of 2012 and 2016. Overall, between the federal elections of 2014 and 2016, almost 16 million people were removed from the rolls. That’s almost 4 million more names than were purged between 2006 and 2008.
We cannot tell how many of those individuals were wrongly kicked off the voter rolls. And there are legitimate reasons that names get deleted in order to help keep voter rolls up-to-date. Individuals can be removed when they pass away or move, for example.
Some states and jurisdictions are using bad information to determine who should be removed from the rolls
But we do know from our research that some states and jurisdictions are using bad information to determine who should be removed from the rolls, like relying on a faulty list that flags eligible voters as ineligible. Some are depending on matching criteria used by a problematic purge database called Crosscheck, which has been found to be more likely to flag African American, Asian American and Latino voters for removal than Caucasian voters. Or officials are processing the data they have in problematic ways, like assuming two individuals with similar identifying information as the same person. Additionally, we identified some states that disregard a waiting period and notice to voters, which is required by federal law before a voter can be purged.
It’s clear that purges are a growing threat. But they’re far from the only thing that will impact voters this fall. Public battles continue over early voting cutbacks, strict laws that demand voters present certain kinds of photo identification before voting, and laws requiring voters to present documentary proof of citizenship before registering to vote. These types of policies have also been shown to dampen the voices of minority voters in particular, and since the 2010 election their prevalence has grown. This November, 23 states will have new barriers in place along these lines.
Advocates have had some successes blunting these laws and blocking others, especially through the courts, but there is still work to be done. And recent decisions by the supreme court emphasize that the judicial branch cannot be counted on as the only backstop against restrictive voting laws.
In addition to its extraordinarily consequential decision five years ago in Shelby County, the supreme court declined to place limits on Ohio’s controversial purge practices this year in its ruling in Husted v A Philip Randolph Institute. Plaintiffs in the case were challenging an Ohio policy that began the process of removing individuals from the rolls if the voter missed just one federal election. Other states have a more generous waiting period before deleting names.
The internal threat of purges and other voting restrictions comes as foreign powers are also making moves to influence our democratic process. By now it’s well known that cybercriminals linked to the Kremlin attempted to access election systems in 21 states. And Russia also took the fight to social media, buying political ads on Twitter, Facebook and Google to sow discord in the electorate.
Amid this onslaught of challenges, there are three key things we can do to make sure everyone’s voice is heard on election day.
Every eligible American needs to register to vote, and every registered voter needs to be proactive about making sure their information is up-to-date. Often states have a way to look this up online. Voters should preferably check records a little over a month before the election, at the latest. Local voter registrars are also available by phone to check on registration status and correct any issues.
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