14 Nov
News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective
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What we know so far
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Who did it? The prime suspects in complex killing operation
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Why France? Secular land that has lost so many to radical Islam
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Front pages French and UK media react
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Lebanese MP calls on EU – whose leaders debated migration in Malta this week – to reinforce infrastructure of countries struggling to host millions of Syrians
Syrian refugees await registration at the UNHCR compound in Tripoli. Lebanon hosts more than 1 million refugees, equal to a quarter of its population. Photograph: Lynsey Addario/UNHCR
Mark Anderson
The EU should channel funds into building new schools and hospitals in the Middle Eastern countries hosting millions of Syrian refugees, rather than spending hundreds of millions of pounds on resettling refugees in Europe, a Lebanese politician has urged.
Robert Fadel, an MP for Lebanon’s March 14 alliance, said his country is struggling to cope with more than 1 million refugees from Syria, which amounts to about one quarter of the country’s population. Lebanon hosts more refugees in relation to its population than any other country, according to the UN’s high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR).
“It’s a huge pressure on your infrastructure – electricity, water, schools, health. So one thing that the EU can do is help in rebuilding or in strengthening the infrastructure,” Fadel said in an interview.
This week EU leaders met in Valletta, Malta, to address a refugee crisis that has seen 800,000 people arrive on European soil this year, and could mean that as many as 3 million more come to Europe by 2017.
Germany has received about 47.5% of all requests for asylum submitted by Syrians in EU member states this year, according to figures published last week. Britain has said it will take in 20,000 Syrian refugees over the next five years……………….
Opinion
Obama’s election gave people hope, not unreasonably, that American might be entering a new era in race relations. But as he prepares to step down, an awful litany of recent injustices just shows how fractured this nation still is
Since the Ferguson uprising of summer 2014, the largest movement for black civil rights since the 60s has coalesced. Photograph: Abe Van Dyke/Demotix/Corbis
I arrived in New York in 2008, in the midst of a bitterly fought election campaign. When Barack Obama declared victory, I was standing at the corner of 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard, the historic heart of Harlem, as part of an emotional crowd watching the speech on a big screen. People around me were in tears. I have never been hugged by so many strangers. Even for someone sceptical about the new president’s ability to deliver on his promise of “hope and change”, the symbolism of a black family in the White House was deeply moving.
Everyone tends to see the world through the prism of their own experience, and I had been lucky enough, in Britain, to live through a period of real racial hope and change, from the frank terror I had felt as a “Paki” kid in the early 80s, to feeling part of a confident “second generation” of British Asians who were suddenly visible in many areas of public life in the late 90s and early 2000s. That period of progress was brought to a grinding halt by 9/11, of course, but those years left me with a streak of Whiggish optimism that now seems naive.
The viciousness of the backlash against Obama was, I thought at the time, only to be expected – all the watermelon jokes and Republican intransigence just the nasty death throes of a racist culture that was steadily being consigned to history. Still, it was a surprise to hear that we were suddenly living in a new “post-racial” era. It was self-evidently childish to imagine that the toxic social legacy of slavery could be eradicated at a stroke by one man’s election, yet many commentators were claiming precisely that; it was as if they couldn’t wait to draw a line, to consign it definitively to the past.
As Obama prepares to leave office, nobody is talking about a post-racial America. Since the Ferguson uprising of summer 2014, the largest movement for black civil rights since the 60s has coalesced. Their enemies have intersecting agendas. Adherents to the millennarian ideology that misleadingly calls itself conservatism are itching to tear everything down and build the City of God, which for a good many of them is apparently a place where white householders shall have justified dominion over the dusky races. Law and order fundamentalists see any questioning of the police’s use of deadly force as the first step on the road to anarchy, and point to the high murder rates in some poor black communities as evidence that, without armed white “supervision”, some innate racial tendency to crime will manifest itself……………
Parisians had got used to the ‘new normal’, but this is an attack on a terrifying scale
US supreme court to hear biggest abortion rights case in two decades
Court will weigh Texas law HB2, which imposes ‘ambulatory surgical center’ requirements on clinics and could leave millions of women without access
Pro-choice activists in Washington DC. The supreme court will hear a challenge to Texas law HB2, which has led to the closure of more than half the state’s abortion clinics. Photograph: Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images
Molly Redden in Washington
The US supreme court has agreed to hear a challenge to one of the nation’s harshest abortion laws in what could be the most consequential case on abortion rights the court has taken in 23 years.
The law, known as HB2, is a Texas measure passed in 2013 that has since led to the closure of more than half the state’s abortion clinics. Out of the hundreds of new abortion restrictions lawmakers have passed since 2010, few have had such a profound impact on abortion access in a single state.
“This law is causing real harm to women across the state of Texas,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder of Whole Woman’s Health, a network of abortion clinics with four locations in Texas. “We have been fighting this draconian law since 2013 … I am hopeful that the supreme court will uphold the rights that have been in place for four decades and reaffirm that every woman should be able to make her own decision about continuing or ending a pregnancy.”
Whole Woman’s Health is one of several providers suing to overturn the law.
Before the law began to take effect, Texas had 41 abortion clinics. A provision requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges with a hospital cut that number in half, and there are 18 clinics today. A second provision of the law, which has been blocked on and off for two years, would further slash the number of providers to nine or 10. That provision mandates that all abortion clinics comply with hospital-like “ambulatory surgical center” standards, which are too expensive for most abortion providers to meet.
The stakes of the case are enormous. Texas abortion providers are challenging the supreme court to declare how far states can go in restricting abortion ostensibly to protect women’s health, which the court has never fully clarified.
In a 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v Casey, the supreme court gave states the right to restrict abortion in the interest of the woman’s health as long as the restriction is not an “undue burden”. But the court has never defined what the term means……………..
Judge’s reversal over same-sex couple’s foster baby may be temporary – officials
Utah child welfare officials says door is open to U-turn at 4 December custody hearing for April Hoagland and Beckie Peirce as advocates file formal complaint
Associated Press in Salt Lake City
April Hoagland and Beckie Peirce say a judge has ordered their foster child to be removed because they’re gay, in a Skype interview on Wednesday. They were approved as foster parents earlier this year by Utah child services but a judge ruled on Tuesday that the three-month-old baby should instead be placed with a heterosexual couple
A Utah judge reversed his decision to take a baby girl from her lesbian foster parents and place her with a heterosexual couple after his ruling caused widespread backlash, but child welfare officials say the change could be temporary.
In an order released on Friday, Judge Scott Johansen allowed the nine-month-old baby to stay for now with April Hoagland and Beckie Peirce, a married couple from the city of Price.
It comes after Johansen said in court on Tuesday that the baby should be removed from the couple’s home within a week. Utah officials and the couple filed court challenges demanding he rescind the order.
Ashley Sumner, spokeswoman for the Utah division of child and family services, said the agency is cautiously optimistic and relieved. But Johansen’s decision still leaves open the possibility that he could order the child removed at a 4 December custody hearing, she said.
“We’re moving in the right direction, but it’s not the final answer,” Sumner said.
In his first ruling, Johansen mentioned research that said children raised by heterosexual families do better and that “same-sex marriages have double the rate of instability as heterosexual marriages”.
That language was crossed out in Johansen’s new order. It now says the court merely cited concerns that research has shown children are more emotionally and mentally stable when raised by a mother and father in the same home………………….
Officer fired for Corey Jones shooting also dismissed from college teacher job
Palm Beach State College said Nouman Raja no longer met adjunct requirements after being let go from police department for killing Florida man in October
Nouman Raja was hired in April to the Palm Beach Gardens police department and was still on probation when he fatally shot Corey Jones. Photograph: Palm Beach Garden Police Department
Associated Press in Miami
A recently dismissed police officer in south Florida who fatally shot an armed man waiting next to his disabled SUV has been fired from his job as a college instructor, the school disclosed on Friday.
Palm Beach State College spokeswoman Grace Truman said in a statement that Nouman Raja was released from his adjunct teaching assignment on Thursday because he is no longer a police officer.
“As Nouman Raja is no longer affiliated with the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department, he does not meet the minimum requirement for teaching set forth by the Florida Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission,” Truman said in an email.
The city of Palm Beach Gardens fired Raja as an officer on Wednesday. City spokeswoman Candice Temple said in a release that Raja was hired in April and was still on probation when the shooting occurred.
Raja was on duty but not in uniform and driving an unmarked van when he approached Corey Jones in the early morning hours of 18 October, authorities said. Jones, a musician who performed with local bands, had just left a gig when his vehicle broke down. A fellow band member tried unsuccessfully to jumpstart the SUV, then left Jones to await a tow truck along a dark ramp on Interstate 95 in Palm Beach Gardens, an affluent city north of West Palm Beach.
At the time, the Palm Beach Gardens police chief, Stephen Stepp, said Raja had been investigating local burglaries, stopped to check out what he thought was an abandoned vehicle and “was suddenly confronted by an armed subject”.
Raja fired six shots at Jones, hitting him three times, officials said. Police said they recovered a .380-caliber gun handgun, which Jones had bought a week earlier.
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