'Prisoners of Europe': the everyday humiliation of refugees stuck in Greece
Europe’s migration policies are turning the country into a giant holding pen, with the people trapped in it close to breaking point
At the Softex refugee camp in northern Greece, it is lighter by night than it is by day. Inside this windowless former warehouse, the lamps only work in the evenings. That is partly because the place was not designed to house people. It is part of what was a toilet paper factory.
“It’s insulting,” says Hendiya Asseni, a 62-year-old Syrian, of being housed in a one-time loo-roll store. “But then everything here is insulting – the life, the food, the fact we have a toilet in front of our tent.”
This humiliation is the logical conclusion of the migration policies that Europe has pursued since the death of Alan Kurdi this time last year. Attempting to stem the flow into Europe, politicians have established a deportation deal with Turkey, from where most Europe-bound migrants depart, and built fences throughout the Balkans, trapping about 50,000 people in Greece.
War against Isis: Security services bracing for possible return of thousands of jihadists as group loses territory
The group is rapidly losing territory across its self-declared ‘caliphate’ in Syria and IraqKim Sengupta Defence Editor
Security services are examining plans for how to deal with thousands of Western jihadists who would seek to return to Europe as Isis continues to lose territory in its “caliphate” and suffer severe losses from pounding air strikes by the US-led coalition and Russia.
Although the Islamist group has suffered increasingly from desertion, very few of the foreign fighters who have left its ranks have returned to Europe in recent times. The numbers coming to Britain for instance, The Independent has learned, have been in no more than single figures for the last eight months.
These extremists, radicalised, armed and trained, will present a severe threat in the near future, “a ticking time bomb” as they try to break out of the region, say security officials, who stress that a coordinated policy is needed to confront the impending crisis.
UN rights chief slams 'demagogues' Trump and Wilders
UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein has reprimanded a host of populist politicians including Donald Trump. The Jordanian prince called for action to stop "demagogues and political fantasists."
Speaking in The Hague on Monday, United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein accused US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump of spreading "humiliating racial and religious prejudice" and warned of a rise of populist politics that could turn violent.
Zeid said Trump and Dutch nationalist Geert Wilders (picture above, left) are among the "populists and demagogues" - which also included Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, leader of France's National Front (FN) Marine Le Pen, and the UK's leading Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage - who have mastered propaganda like the "Islamic State" (IS), saying that they "benefit from each other."
ANALYSIS
Ankara and Washington's dirty little secrets have kept the war in Syria going
Maher Mughrabi
The Syrian regime is fond of blaming the war on its soil on meddling foreign powers.
Yet the truth is that each of the many foreign powers involved in the Syrian conflict has been reluctant to intervene directly, doing so only when they felt that their worst-case scenario was in danger of being realised.
For Washington, the worst-case scenario was that Islamic State should manage to establish a de facto state in Syria and Iraq, and it carried out air strikes to prevent that happening, even as it backed off pursuing the Assad regime for its massive violations of human rights.
For Moscow, the worst-case scenario was the fall of the Assad regime in Damascus. Only when that possibility loomed - and with it the loss of Russia's platform for influencing events in the Middle East - did the Kremlin intervene directly.
'My friends were afraid of me': What 80 million unexploded US bombs did to Laos
Updated 0557 GMT (1357 HKT) September 6, 2016
For two years after the accident, Yei Yang refused to leave his home.
"I couldn't farm, I couldn't go to see friends, as they might be afraid of me," Yang tells CNN.
"I didn't want to live."
Yang was just 22 and burning rubbish near his village in the province of Xieng Khoung in north-eastern Laos, when a bomb blast tore off one of his eyelids, his top lip and an ear, mutilated one of his arms, and left him with severe scarring from the waist up.
"I remembered I burned the garbage, but after the explosion I was unconscious for two weeks," Yang says. "I felt extreme pain...all over my body. I still feel pain always."
Myanmar Buddhists boo ex-UN chief Kofi Annan
Kofi Annan arrives to investigate communal conflict pitting ethnic Rakhine Buddhists against Rohingya Muslim minority.
Kofi Annan, the former UN chief, has been given a hostile welcome by local Buddhists in Myanmar's western Rakhine state where he will investigate the religious conflict that has displaced tens of thousands of Muslim Rohingya people.
Annan has been entrusted by Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Myanmar's new government, with the task of finding ways to heal wounds in the bitterly divided and impoverished region.
Hundreds turned out on Tuesday morning as Annan landed at Sittwe airport to make clear that he was not welcome.
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