As a girl by herself wandering wantonly within the woods, I was kept company
By animal voices and ancient whispers from the tree canopy
When my bare feet touched warm soil, planted firmly on earth, I was so aware
I was never alone, I belonged to this mystic beauty, and happily had not a care
Yet by the time I was a young woman, ready to journey from my home
The animal voices, many were going quiet it was well known [Read more…]
From the Democracy Now! website:
Eight men are on trial in Honduras for the murder of environmentalist Berta Cáceres, who was gunned down in her home in La Esperanza in 2016. A verdict is expected this week. The assassination of Cáceres came a year after she won the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work protecting indigenous communities and her campaign against a massive hydroelectric dam project. We speak with Dana Frank, professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her new book is titled, “The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup.”
On October 10, 2018, the county Board of Supervisors (BOS) adopted a 20-year plan for McClellan-Palomar (Palomar) Airport in Carlsbad and certified an EIR.
A month later, the citizens group Citizens for a Friendly Airport (see c4fa.org) filed suit challenging the county decision. A suit verdict is likely in mid or late 2019. Issues the court may have to wrestle with include:
One question for the court would be: Did the county engage in a “bait and switch” – analyzing low levels of Palomar use in the EIR, while encouraging higher use levels with Lindbergh diversions?
From the Now This YouTube website:
It’s no secret that President Donald Trump dislikes Obamacare. Paul Ryan and the Republicans in Congress tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act put in place by President Barack Obama. So how can you stick it to President Trump in 2018? Sign up for health care through Healthcare.gov. Healthcare in America has been a hot debate for decades, but if you need health insurance, you can go to Healthcare.gov and sign up for 2019. The deadline to get health care in America is December 15.
The park’s gates had been ripped down and rebuilt, higher and fiercer than he had seen in the year he had lived near the coast. Barbed wire had been looped in a crown around the fence’s top and iron doors installed at either entrance. The nest had fallen and lay in the park beneath a tree thirty feet from the new fence.
On his daily morning walks he looked inside the park, before and after the fence’s reconstruction. The flat green grass of the park appeared so different than the faded winter brown of trees in a California city.
In the evenings, walking by the fence, he looked in the park out of habit after completing his part-time shift at the library near the border-crossing. However, the nest, a ratty gathering of dead grass, straw, and tangled stems and fibers, had fallen. It held a single gray chick, screaming. He did not know what kind of bird but even in the diminishing light, he saw the chick, plaintive and alone, in the fallen nest. [Read more…]
ACLU Deputy Director, Immigrants’ Rights Project, Lee Gelernt speaks with All In’s Chris Hayes about the process of seeking asylum in the U.S., and the current Administration’s attempt to subvert that process in violation of current U.S. and international law. One recent attempt on November 9th was for Trump to issue a proclamation declaring that only those entering the United States at designated ports of entry would be eligible to apply for asylum. It then submitted a rule to the federal register, letting it go into effect immediately and without the customary period for public comment. After a number of civil rights groups took the government to court, Lee Gelernt successfully argued against that case, with Judge Jon S. Tigar of the United States District Court in San Francisco in Monday issuing a temporary restraining order blocking the implementation of that rule. [Read more…]
It is hard, if not impossible, to maintain awareness and then do something about the constant erosion of civil rights of minority populations in our country. The Trump administration never sleeps when it comes to undermining current laws or attempting to supplant them with cruel new ones, the Constitution be damned.
Recent news, both locally and national have underscored the degree to which transgender women and men sustain some of the worst weaponized bigotry and intolerance imaginable. They are paying with their lives, their employment opportunities and their ability to simply exist in society–you know, the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness guaranteed to each one of us. [Read more…]
By Edward Sifuentes / ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties
One night in late October, volunteers with the San Diego Rapid Response Network received the first of many reports of asylum-seeking migrant families being released on the streets of San Diego by immigration authorities.
Many of the families, which included women and small children, were disoriented, hungry and penniless. Most knew no one in our region. They were literally strangers in a strange land.
These new arrivals – primarily from Central America and from as far away as Africa – are being abandoned on our streets because the Trump administration discontinued the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program that helps asylum-seekers to coordinate their travel to loved ones throughout the United States. ICE says it no longer has room to hold migrant families long enough to finalize travel arrangements.
Consequently, ICE is now releasing asylum-seeking families into our communities without food, transportation or shelter – and without coordinating or even communicating with local governments or nonprofit agencies who want to help them. [Read more…]
From the YouTube website:
In May, 1939, the SS St. Louis, a ship of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution left Hamburg, bound for Havana, Cuba. Without their knowledge, their landing passes had been voided by the Cuban President, Laredo Bru. When the ship arrived in Cuba, the passengers were not allowed to debark. Representatives from the Jewish Joint Distribution committee negotiated with the Cuban government, but to no avail. The passengers appealed to President Roosevelt to allow them to land in the United States, but they were again turned away. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where two-thirds of the passengers would perish in the Holocaust.
Current U.S. and international asylum policies and laws owe much to the eventual repudiation of that sort of reaction to the plight of refugees. [Read more…]
As if ripping children from their parents’ arms, locking them up in cages or sending them to facilities on the other side of the country weren’t the absolute low point of the Trump administrations response to immigrants seeking asylum, we are now tear gassing children.
Let that sink in for a moment. We are tear gassing children, who were reported as running screaming and crying from the tear gas canisters shot into Mexico, a foreign country, by US Border Patrol. (Imagine this situation reversed, with Mexico lobbying canisters into the US.)
There is essentially no operative immigration policy in this country.
[Read more…]
KPBS’s Jean Guerrero was in Tijuana Sunday to report on the situation with the migrants that have been arriving from Central America. Here is some footage capturing the conditions around the municipal sports facility where the city is attempting to accommodate the arriving migrants. She also interviews a person who salvaged a spent tear gas canister from an earlier event where migrants approached the U.S. border. [Read more…]
By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos
Disasters strike in this country and around the world 365 days a year. There are no holiday dispensations for natural disasters. For the victims—food, clothing, and shelter are not luxuries—they are necessities for survival.
This Thanksgiving, if you are one of the people fortunate enough to not be worrying about that next meal, if you are not living under a blue tarp, or homeless because your house has been flooded or burned out, take a moment to count your blessings, and reach out to support the many heroes who ensure that next meal for those who wouldn’t have one, without help.
One group of heroes are the chefs of World Central Kitchen, founded by Chef José Andrés, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Many readers became aware of his work, and that of #ChefsforPuertoRico when double disasters struck Puerto Rico and the USVI—back-to-back Hurricanes Irma and Maria. [Read more…]
