How Falluja can't forget
By Paul Adams
6 September 2017
So-called Islamic State is fighting desperately to avoid destruction, after losing its stronghold in Mosul.
But what happens after IS leaves town?
The troubled Iraqi city of Falluja has painful lessons.
As night falls on Falluja and darkness takes the edge off the blistering summer heat, Anas al-Janabi switches on the lights.
A creaky ferris wheel, with saucer-like gondolas in primary colours, starts to turn.
Below, customers begin to arrive, attracted by an oasis of coloured lights and booming music.
There are dodgems and spinning teacup rides. There’s popcorn and a bearded Smurf, shimmying like a bellydancer despite the heat and his bulky yellow costume.
Aung San Suu Kyi says 'terrorists' are misinforming world about Myanmar violence
De facto leader responds to growing international criticism by attacking ‘fake news’ about the plight of Rohingya Muslims
Aung San Suu Kyi has blamed “terrorists” for “a huge iceberg of misinformation” about violence in western Myanmar that has forced more than 120,000 Rohingya refugees into neighbouring Bangladesh.
The de-facto leader of Myanmar is under growing pressure to halt “clearance operations” by security forces in Rakhine state that the United Nations secretary-general has warned could verge on ethnic cleansing.
A statement posted by Aung San Suu Kyi’s office to Facebook on Wednesday said she had spoken with Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan about the crisis that he has repeatedly called a “genocide”.
Trump has somehow managed to enrage every country he needs to avert catastrophe with North Korea
While Kim Jong-un has been coolly single-minded, undistracted by the West’s assorted remonstrations against him, the United States has been the opposite
Donald Trump did not create the raging sore that North Korea has become, but he does done little to soothe it. On the contrary, his instinct, as with so many other things, has been to prod and scratch. If you think this sounds dangerous, you are not alone. The whole world is nervous.
Let’s be clear, though, this is not pure fecklessness. Trump is in part a victim of timing. If previous US presidents, going back to Bill Clinton, were able one way or another to sweep the North Korea conundrum under the rug it was because the threat it posed remained largely theoretical. The regime’s quest for nuclear mastery was still in the slide-rule stage.
EU court rejects Hungary, Slovak case against taking refugees
The European Union’s top court dismissed complaints on Wednesday by Slovakia and Hungary about EU migration policy, upholding Brussels’ right to force member states to take in asylum seekers.
In the latest twist to a divisive dispute that broke out two years ago when over a million migrants poured across the Mediterranean, the European Court of Justice found that the EU was entitled to order national governments to take in quotas of mainly Syrian refugees relocated from Italy and Greece.
"The court dismisses the actions brought by Slovakia and Hungary against the provisional mechanism for the mandatory relocation of asylum seekers," the Luxembourg-based court said in a statement.
"The mechanism actually contributes to enabling Greece and Italy to deal with the impact of the 2015 migration crisis and is proportionate."
Rio Olympic committee chief Carlos Alberto Nuzman paid $2 million bribe, police allege
The head of Brazil's Olympic committee allegedly paid a $2 million bribe to secure votes for Brazil. The allegations came as police revealed a nine-month investigation into the corruption behind the Olympic bid.
Brazilian and French investigators announced on Tuesday they had uncovered an international corruption scheme centered on awarding the 2016 Olympic Games to Rio de Janeiro.
The head of the national Olympic committee was accused of arranging a $2 million (€1.7 million) to secure the games in the city, despite it having the worst conditions.
Federal Brazilian police said "there are strong indications" that committee head Carlos Alberto Nuzman had bought votes from fellow African members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in order for Rio to be chosen as the Games venue in 2009. Rio beat out Chicago, Tokyo and Madrid.
Why ending DACA is so unprecedented
Trump’s decision to wind down DACA unless Congress acts doesn’t just threaten 800,000 immigrants. It threatens America’s immigration legacy.
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The Trump administration’s announcement Tuesday, that it will end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — removing deportation protection and work permits from nearly 800,000 young unauthorized immigrants — unless Congress passes a bill in the next six months to protect DACA recipients, isn’t a punt or a reprieve. It’s an opportunity to deflect, or share, the responsibility for what would be an unprecedented act in US history.
There’s never really been a time when a generation of people, raised and rooted in the United States, has been stripped of official recognition and pushed back into the precarity of unauthorized-immigrant life.
Even though DACA never officially legalized anyone, ending it would be, in a way, the biggest “illegalization” of immigrants in American history.
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