Australia considers strict screening of Muslim refugees
Controversial leaked document proposes new assessments for 12,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees to stop "extremism".
Al Jazeera Staff | | Australia, Refugees, Politics, Human Rights, Humanitarian crises
A leaked government document calling for enhanced screening of Australia's humanitarian refugee intake from Syria and Iraq has attracted widespread criticism from opposition parties and members of the Lebanese community, who were singled out as being prone to "extremism".
The sensitive Cabinet document, which was leaked to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Thursday, recommends that the government applies "additional screening criteria" to 12,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees who are set to resettle in Australia as part of the country's response to the refugee crisis in the Middle East.
"It is expected that some refugees from this conflict will bring with them issues, beliefs or associations that lead them to advocate or engage in politically motivated or communal violence," the leaked document said, explaining why additional screening was required.
Brace yourself for a cyber-tsunami – the six biggest waves of change about to hit the world
Author Alec Ross looks at how robots, genomics and big data are going to change our lives forever
As a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, Alec Ross travelled the world with the remit of cataloguing the best examples of innovation the human race has to offer. His trips took him to Korea, the Congo and Silicon Valley (and far enough overall he has calculated, to take him from the Earth to the moon twice, with a side trip from the US to New Zealand), and left him with a concern that the rate of change could leave many behind.
From robots entering the workforce and leading to the very real prospect of redundancy within a decade for the million employees of Taiwan’s electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn to genetic engineering unleashing the possibility of designer babies, the power of technology to reshape the world is reaching historic levels.
But the people who have the most to lose from those changes are often the ones who get the least warning. That, says Ross, was his motivation for writing The Industries of the Future, which looks at six of the biggest waves of change about to hit the world. Ross aims to help readers to “learn a lot about topics that they usually find boring or too technical – and they’ll then be able to make some better informed decisions about their future”.
Flint prisoners including pregnant women were forced to drink poisoned water
Prisoners were not given bottled water until 23 January - they drank lead-contaminated water for months after Mayor announced a state emergency
Hundreds of prisoners including pregnant women in the Genesee County jail in Flint were forced to drink poisoned water until 23 January.
As reported by Democracy Now!, former prisoner Jody Cramer, who was released this week after serving two months, said prisoners were drinking the lead-contaminated water since October 2015, when Flint Mayor Karen Weaver announced the water crisis was a state of emergency.
Mr Cramer said the jail briefly switched to bottled water after the announcement in October but went back to tap water from the Flint river after just five days.
“Many inmates made complaints due to the fact that the deputies did not drink from the faucets,” he said.
“We were consistently told the water was good,” he added.
What it’s like to get stuck in an airport…for a year
It’s like the real-life version of the nightmare portrayed in the Tom Hanks movie The Terminal: getting stuck indefinitely in an airport because you don’t have the right papers. This is the reality for about 30 people who have been detained in a small room in Istanbul’s busy airport – some for over a year. These young men are stuck in limbo, waiting to find out if they’ll be repatriated or will eventually obtain permission to enter Turkey. Our Observer spent a night in this tiny airport detention centre.
By official count, more than 2.2 million Syrians and 300,000 Iraqis currently reside in Turkey, which has become a transit country for migrants seeking to enter Europe.
Of the more than one million people who entered the European Union by sea in 2015, more than three-fourths departed from Turkey’s coasts.
China concedes missing Hong Kong booksellers are 'under investigation'
James Pomfret
Hong Kong: Chinese police have confirmed for the first time that three of five Hong Kong booksellers who went missing were being investigated for "illegal activities" in China, according to a letter sent to Hong Kong's police.
The disappearances have prompted fears that mainland Chinese authorities may be using shadowy tactics that erode the "one country, two systems" formula under which Hong Kong has been governed since its return to China from British rule in 1997.
The three men; Lui Por, Cheung Chi-ping and Lam Wing-kee who were linked to the Causeway Bay Books store, had had "criminal compulsory measures" imposed on them, Chinese police in the southern province of Guangdong bordering Hong Kong told Hong Kong police in the letter on Thursday.Artist Wafaa Bilal uses blank books to rebuild Baghdad's war-torn library
Updated 0251 GMT (1051 HKT) February 5, 2016
At its height, the college of fine arts library at the University of Baghdad housed more than 70,000 books. From floor to ceiling, the topics ranged from the history of art, modern forms of art, and oral history.
Students from around the country came to study at the sprawling university campus in the Iraqi capital and study in the massive library.
Then came the US-led Iraq invasion in 2003.
And when the shells stopped dropping, the books that had not been looted were left as ash. The entire library was destroyed as the rubble settled.
Now, one lone artist is trying to restock those books.
White books for Baghdad
Moving from the holy city of Najaf to the capital, Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi-American artist, spent his university years at the library tucked away on a campus by the Tigris River.
Twenty-five years later, the memory of fine arts library has stayed with Bilal.
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