Thomas Paine's version of "you didn't build that":
"Separate an individual from society,and give him an island or a continent to possess,and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end,in all cases,that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore,of personal property,beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice,of gratitude,and of civilization,a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came"
Submitted by Leah
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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.
He spoke of wanting to give his readers an idea of what the soldier’s experience was: ‘His apprehensions and sufferings, his tensions and releases, his behaviour in the presence of threatening death’
Figures cover period from October 2017 to February
Senior official: separations have risen sharply in recent weeks
Reuters in Washington
Central American immigrants await transportation to a US border patrol processing center after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into Texas. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images
Nearly 1,800 immigrant families were separated at the US-Mexico border from October 2016 until February of this year, as Donald Trump implemented stricter border enforcement policies, according to a senior government official.
The numbers are the first comprehensive disclosure by the administration of how many families have been affected by the policies. Previously, the only numbers provided by federal officials on family separations covered a single two-week period in May.
The government official, who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity, said he could not provide up-to-date statistics, but acknowledged the number of separations had risen sharply in recent weeks, largely because of new administration policies.
In May, the US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, announced a “zero tolerance” policy in which all those apprehended entering the United States illegally would be criminally charged, which generally leads to children being separated from their parents.
A US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official testified last month to Congress that between 6 and 19 May, 658 children were separated from 638 parents because of the stepped-up prosecutions. That brings the total of officially acknowledged separations to more than 2,400, though that does not include recent weeks or the period from 1 March to 6 May.
Immigration and child advocates, Democratic lawmakers and the United Nations have all condemned the practice of separating families at the border, but the administration has defended its actions saying it is protecting children and making clear that illegal border crossers will be prosecuted regardless of their family circumstances.
In most of the 1,768 cases of families separated by border agents between October 2016 and February, children were removed from parents for medical reasons or because of security concerns, the official said, citing examples such as parents needing hospitalization or officials discovering the parent had a criminal record either in the United States or in their home country.
In 237 cases, the official said, children were removed because border agents suspected adults were falsely posing as the parents of minors in their charge.
The period for which statistics were provided included the final three months of the Obama administration in 2016, but the official could not say whether any of the separations occurred then.
The practice of separating families has not been systematically tracked until now, the official said, and the figures given to Reuters had to be compiled manually.
“Why weren’t we pulling these statistics before? Because it wasn’t a big enough phenomenon that had public interest,” the official said. “Now it’s increasing and it’s of public interest.“
The bulk of the separations involved Central Americans, who make up the majority of families crossing the south-west border. Some were apprehended trying to cross the border illegally, while others crossed illegally and then presented themselves to border patrol agents asking for asylum because they feared returning home.
The official noted that the number of separations from October 2016 to February this year represented less than 2% of the 106,700 family units arrested along the south-west border during that same period.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing the government on behalf of a Congolese asylum seeker who turned herself in to border guards in California only to have her seven-year-old daughter taken from her and housed in government custody more than 2,000 miles away in Chicago for months.
Democrats say Republican gubernatorial candidate must resign
Employee responsible for database did not know how to log on
Associated Press in Tallahassee, Florida
Protestors gather at the Florida state Capitol in Tallahassee, after the Parkland school shooting in February. Photograph: Colin Abbey/EPA
For more than a year, Florida failed to carry out national background checks that could have disqualified people from gaining a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
Florida does not allow the open carry of weapons, but more than 1.9 million people in the state have permits to carry guns and weapons in public if they are concealed. The lapse in background checks for such permits was revealed in an internal report that was not widely known about until Friday.
The state ultimately revoked 291 permits and fired an employee after an inspector general’s report was sent in June 2017 to top officials. The Tampa Bay Times was the first to publish information about the report, which pointed out that the state failed to check the National Instant Criminal Background Check System from February 2016 to March 2017.
Agriculture commissioner Adam Putnam, a Republican running for governor whose department processes concealed weapons permits and who has touted his efforts to make it easier for people to obtain them, said the state did conduct its own criminal background checks on those applying for permits during that period. He blamed the problem on the negligence of a department employee.
“The former employee was both deceitful and negligent, and we immediately launched an investigation and implemented safeguards to ensure this never happens again,” Putnam said in a statement.
McKinley Lewis, a spokesman for Republican governor Rick Scott, said the governor’s office was never given a copy of the inspector general’s report.
The final report issued in June 2017 states that an employee in the Division of Licensing did not run applications through the national system because she could not log into the database. The employee is quoted as saying that she “dropped the ball”.
The Times interviewed the employee, Lisa Wilde, who told them she was working in the mailroom when she was given oversight of the database in 2013.
“I didn’t understand why I was put in charge of it,” Wilde said.
Democrats and gun control advocates criticized Putnam and said he should resign. Putnam has raised the ire of gun control advocates for his proclamation last year that he was a “proud NRA sellout” who supports the National Rifle Association.
He also said he would not have signed the gun and school safety law enacted by the Florida legislature in the aftermath of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in February, in which 17 people were killed.
“Career politicians like Mr Putnam think this is just another bad day at the office – but when you conceal a level of negligence that endangers every resident, and every child, in Florida, you forfeit any moral right to lead,” said former Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine, one of the Democratic candidates for governor.
The state used the national system to see if there were reasons such as mental illness or drug addictions that should prevent someone from being issued a concealed weapons permit. But in March 2017 a state employee noted that the state was not getting any correspondence from people whose applications had been rejected due to information gleaned from the national database.
The US president and the North Korean leader are set to meet in Singapore on 12 June after cancelling and then reinstating their summit initially agreed on 8 May. After months of trading threats and insults before the agreement to talk face to face, will they actually keep to their word and sit down together?
Donald Trump said on Friday that he may grant a posthumous pardon to Muhammad Ali, seemingly unaware that the great boxer’s conviction was overturned by the supreme court 47 years ago.
Departing for the G7 summit in Canada, the president told reporters at the White House he was looking at “thousands of names” of people who could be granted clemency.
Ali refused to enter the military during the Vietnam war and his local draft board rejected his application for classification as a conscientious objector. He received a draft-evasion conviction in 1967 and was stripped of his world heavyweight title.
“He was, look, he was not very popular then, certainly his memory is popular now,” Trump said. “I’m thinking about that very seriously, and some others.”
Ali was sentenced to five years in prison but he appealed and in 1971 the supreme court overturned his conviction, finding that the justice department improperly told the draft board Ali’s stance was not motivated by his religious beliefs as a Muslim. Trump’s gesture is therefore meaningless.
Ali’s lawyer, Ron Tweel, said: “We appreciate President Trump’s sentiment, but a pardon is unnecessary. The US supreme court overturned the conviction of Muhammad Ali in a unanimous decision in 1971. There is no conviction from which a pardon is needed.”
Trump recently granted a posthumous pardon to the first African American heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who was convicted in 1913 of violating a law that made it illegal to transport women across state lines for “immoral” purposes.
Earlier this week, he also commuted the life sentence of a woman whose cause was championed by Kim Kardashian West.
“The power to pardon is a beautiful thing,” Trump told reporters. “I want to do people who are unfairly treated like Alice [Marie Johnson].”
A recent Citizens’ Assembly ballot shows that there is a huge public appetite for strong action on emissions
Peter Thorne
Ireland will miss its 2020 international emissions target by a wide margin. Photograph: Design Pics Inc/REX/Shutterstock
Last week the Irish Environmental Protection Agency confirmed that Ireland will miss its 2020 international emissions target by a wide margin. The goal is 20% cuts on 2005 levels; in reality we’re on track for 1%.
It further predicted that the gap between stated ambition and reality will, if anything, widen over the coming years. Starting from 2020 this will almost certainly mean fines – potentially of millions of euros – being levied by the European commission.
Plans such as a 20% increase in milk production to satisfy export markets in China and beyond point Ireland unambiguously in the wrong direction. Peat, the most dirty fuel of all, is still commercially extracted and burned to produce some of the country’s electricity. As well as increasing our carbon footprint it degrades our national ecosystems. Microgeneration of electricity cannot be pushed back on to the grid, even for free, making Ireland a sore thumb anomaly internationally and curtailing domestic renewables uptake. Electric vehicle take-up remains abysmally low. Ireland has a lot to do just to play catch-up, let alone take a leadership role, in tackling climate change.
Ireland has also been heavily in the news recently over the referendum to repeal the eighth amendment, which prohibited abortion. The role of the Citizens’ Assembly, an exercise in deliberative democracy, in the process has, quite rightly, been lauded. It proved that given time, access to expert evidence, the absence of the proverbial megaphones of vested interests, and a conducive environment to discuss issues, citizens can, and will, come to informed and nuanced opinions.
Less well known, at least outside Ireland, is that the assembly have considered a number of additional topics. These included how the state can help make Ireland a leader in tackling climate change. As noted already, Ireland’s progress to date on this issue has been wholly inadequate.
It was my privilege to serve on the expert advisory group of the assembly for its climate deliberations. Citizens were presented over two weekends with what amounted to a crash course in, not just the evidence basis for climate change, but also what critical aspects of their life, such as energy, transport, agriculture, and our homes might look like 30 years hence, were Ireland to become a leader in tackling climate change. They were also shown inspiring present day exemplars such as the Dublin fire brigade station that has gone carbon neutral, through community owned renewable energy efforts in Tipperary, to organic low-impact farmers.
Crucially, these discussions were undertaken without the voices of vested interests, from both ends of the spectrum. These all too often tend to obfuscate, and discussions of climate change in the public sphere turn into a slanging match.
At the end of the two weekends citizens voted on a range of questions. If the citizens are as representative of broader society as implied by the eight amendment deliberations, where the assembly ballot results almost exactly matched the referendum result, then the results were awe-inspiring. They should act as a real wake-up call to both the current government and future governments. Every single question given to the citizens attained at least 80% agreement. Most attained close to unanimous agreement.
Real efforts were made to ensure that the questions given were balanced and nuanced and properly reflected trade-offs that would be required in the real-world. There were no questions, for example, about subsidies without a commensurate counterweight of a source of increased revenues to cover the costs.
But they also recognised aspects such as equity that could and should be achieved. So, for example, there was a question around raising taxes on carbon intensive activities. But the funds would then be ringfenced and used to enable the transition to lower-intensity activities, with priority given to those in fuel poverty and community owned activities.
The citizens were almost unanimous in desiring an act similar to the UK Climate Change Act with a watchdog similar to the Climate Change Committee charged with setting sector-wise targets but given real teeth – the ability to sue the government or other public bodies for non-conformance.
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