Trump official appears to walk back inclusion of green-card holders in travel ban even as others defend it

Hundreds of protesters gathered at the arrivals gate of Washington Dulles International Airport to push back against President Trump's executive order that targeted citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries. A federal judge in New York blocked deportations nationwide late Saturday of those detained on entry to the United States. (McKenna Ewen/The Washington Post)

By Brady Dennis, Jerry Markon and Katherine Shaver January 29 at 2:02 PM

A top Trump official appeared on Sunday to walk back one of the most controversial elements of an executive order that bans entry to the United States from refugees, migrants and foreign nationals from seven mostly Muslim countries: its impact on green-card holders, who are permament legal residents of the United States.

“As far as green-card holders going forward, it doesn’t affect them,” Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” contradicting what government officials had said only a day earlier.

Other senior administration officials on Sunday defended Trump’s ban after a weekend of intense backlash over the broadness of the executive order, even as they sought to clarify its reach. Lawmakers from both parties, including Republican senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), spoke out against the action, and federal judges quickly ruled against parts of it.

In a joint statement, McCain and Graham said the government has a responsibility to defend its borders but must uphold “all that is decent and exceptional about our nation.”

“It is clear from the confusion at our airports across the nation that President Trump’s executive order was not properly vetted,” they said, adding, “Such a hasty process risks harmful results.”

Photos from the scene of protest at New York’s JFK airport against Trump’s executive order halting refu­gee admissions

Entry to the United States is being refused to legal residents, including green-card holders, from seven mostly Muslim countries who were abroad when the executive order was signed Friday by the president, and some travelers were detained at U.S. airports.

Judicial rulings in several cities across the country overnight immediately blocked enforcement of the ban to various degrees, but the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement early Sunday indicating it would continue to implement President Trump’s action.

The statement, which did little to clear up the confusion and frustration playing out at airports across the globe, said the administration “will comply with judicial orders” even as it continues to carry out the president’s order.

“Prohibited travel will remain prohibited, and the U.S. government retains its right to revoke visas at any time if required for national security or public safety,” the statement said. “No foreign national in a foreign land, without ties to the United States, has any unfettered right to demand entry into the United States or to demand immigration benefits in the United States.”

Trump’s virtually unprecedented executive action applies to migrants, refugees and U.S. legal residents — green-card holders — from Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Libya and Yemen. People subject to being denied entry include dual nationals, who are those born in one of the seven countries who also hold passports from U.S. allies such as the United Kingdom.

While lawyers are still reviewing a federal court’s temporary stay, administration officials said they believe it is possible for the White House to both comply with the judge’s order and continue enforcing Trump’s executive action. Their thinking is that the judge’s order affects only people now in the United States, and that since the State Department is proactively canceling visas of people from seven predominantly Muslim countries, other travelers who would be affected by the judge’s order are not expected to be able to travel to the United States in the first place.

Remarkably, the officials pointed out that while the order affects specifically deportations, the travelers currently stranded at U.S. airports are not legally considered to be deported if they go back to their home countries, because they were never technically admitted to the United States.

That interpretation of the law will almost certainly lead to more court battles in coming days and could keep overseas travelers detained at airports in a state of legal limbo.

Trump administration officials defended the president’s executive order temporarily banning entry to the U.S. from seven mostly Muslim countries, but lawmakers from both parties expressed strong concern or objection. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

Just after 8 a.m. Sunday, Trump tweeted: “Our country needs strong borders and extreme vetting, NOW. Look what is happening all over Europe and, indeed, the world — a horrible mess!”

Later in the morning, Trump tweeted, “Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!”

The president’s aggressive action triggered a wave of criticism from Democrats on Capitol Hill, but also from a growing number of lawmakers in his own party.

“You have an extreme vetting proposal that didn’t get the vetting it should have,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” even as he stopped short of opposing the order outright.

But Republican leaders in Congress on Sunday did not join the opposition to Trump’s order.

“I don’t want to criticize them for improving vetting,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on ABC’s “This Week.” He cautioned that the United States doesn’t have a religious test for entry into the country, and stopped short of saying that Trump’s action amounted to a Muslim ban.

“I think we need to be careful,” McConnell said. “We don’t have religious tests in this country.”

The Department of Homeland Security noted that “less than one percent” of international air travelers arriving Saturday in the United States were “inconvenienced” by the executive order — though the situation described by lawyers and immigrant advocates across the country Saturday was one of widespread uncertainty and even chaos at airports where travelers from the targeted countries were suddenly detained.

Federal judges began stepping in late Saturday as requests for stays of President Trump’s action flooded courtrooms from coast to coast.

Late Saturday, a federal judge in New York temporarily blocked deportations nationwide. Her ruling was followed by similar decisions by federal judges in Virginia, Seattle and Boston.

In Brooklyn, Judge Ann Donnelly of the U.S. District Court granted a request from the American Civil Liberties Union to stop the deportations after determining that the risk of injury to those detained by being returned to their home countries necessitated the decision.

Next came a temporary restraining order by District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, who blocked for seven days the removal of any green-card holders detained at Dulles International Airport. Brinkema’s action also ordered that lawyers have access to those held there because of the ban.

In Seattle, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas S. Zilly granted an emergency stay preventing the deportation of two people had been detained at the Sea-Tac International Airport, according to the ACLU of Washington, which joined other advocates in filing an emergency motion. The two people remain in federal custody and will have a hearing later this week, the group said.

Just before 2 a.m. Sunday in Boston, two federal judges ruled for two University of Massachusetts Dartmouth associate professors — Iranian nationals who are permanent legal residents in the United States — who were held at Logan International Airport when they landed after travel for an academic conference.

The judges there also put a seven-day restraining order on Trump’s executive action. It allows any approved refugee, visa holder, or green-card holder to fly into Boston over the next 7 days and requires Customs and Border Protection to notify airlines that fly into Logan Airport that those passengers will not be detained or forced to return. The ruling applies only to Massachusetts.

The president’s order also riggered harsh reactionsfrom key sectors of the U.S. business community. Leading technology companies recalled scores of overseas employees and sharply criticized the president. Legal experts forecast a wave of litigation over the order, calling it unconstitutional. Lawyers and advocates for immigrants are advising them to seek asylum in Canada.

[The tumultuous politics of U.S. immigration policy, from Roosevelt to Trump]

Yet Trump, who centered his campaign in part on his vow to crack down on illegal immigrants and impose what became known as his “Muslim ban,’’ was unbowed. As White House officials insisted that the measure strengthens national security, the president stood squarely behind it.

“It’s not a Muslim ban, but we were totally prepared,” Trump told reporters Saturday in the Oval Office. “You see it at the airports, you see it all over. It’s working out very nicely, and we’re going to have a very, very strict ban, and we’re going to have extreme vetting, which we should have had in this country for many years.”

In New York, Donnelly seemed to have little patience for the government’s arguments, which focused heavily on the fact that the two defendants named in the lawsuit had already been released.

Donnelly noted that those detained were suffering mostly from the bad fortune of traveling while the ban went into effect. “Our own government presumably approved their entry to the country,” she said at one point, noting that, had it been two days earlier, those detained would have been granted admission without question.

During the hearing, ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt informed the court that he had received word of a deportation to Syria, scheduled within the hour. That prompted Donnelly to ask if the government could assure that the person would not suffer irreparable harm. Receiving no such assurance, she granted the stay to the broad group included in the ACLU’s request.

A senior Department of Homeland Security official said late Saturday that 109 people had been denied entry into the United States. All had been in transit when Trump signed the order, he said, and some had already departed the United States on flights by late Saturday while others were still being detained awaiting flights. Also, 173 people had not been allowed to board U.S.-bound planes at foreign airports.

The protests that had begun at airports around the country on Saturday continued on Sunday, with crowds swelling in terminals from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles and places in between. In Washington, protestors flocked to Reagan National Airport and Dulles International Airport. By early afternoon, a raucous crowd of demonstrators filled Lafayette Square and part of Pennsylvania Avenue. Fencing that remained from the recent inauguration kept them from getting closer to the gates of the White House.

Philip Bump in New York, Daniel Gross in Boston, and Michael Chandler Sarah Larimer, Kelsey Snell and Abby Phillip in Washington contributed to this report.

My Family Waited 13 Years to Resettle in the United States. Then Trump Slammed the Door in Our Faces.

BY ASAD HUSSEIN-JANUARY 29, 2017

The phone chimes. I know who is calling, even without looking at the screen.

“You have heard about it, right? What Trump did…,” Maryan trails off.

“Yes, I read about it on Twitter,” I reply, almost without emotion.

“Why us? Why always our family?” she asks.

“Dear, I don’t know, walaahi” — by God — “please calm down.”

In truth, I don’t know how either of us can be calm right now. The executive order suspending refugee admissions to the United States and blocking entry from seven predominantly Muslim countries, including my parents’ home country of Somalia, means that my family will likely never be reunited in America.

A quarter century after my parents fled to a refugee camp in Kenya, and 13 years after our family applied to be resettled in the United States, the door has finally been slammed shut. My sister lives in Richland, Washington. My parents were in the final stages of the vetting process for a visa; they are scheduled to be interviewed at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in February. And me?I am still caged in the refugee camp where I was born.

It didn’t always feel this hopeless. I remember the excitement of learning that the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) had opened a resettlement case for my family to come to the United States. I was eight and had just started the third grade. It was my first encounter with America, a place the other refugees spoke about the same way they spoke about the hereafter. America was Elysium in their imagination, and my family was among the first to be shortlisted to go there.

My parents stopped sending me to school, assuming I would be in an American classroom in a matter of months. In those days, we were all naive about the resettlement process. People suspended their lives immediately after UNHCR opened their cases — children dropped out of school, families gave away their belongings, and shopkeepers packed up their wares. Couples even stopped making love. A pregnancy, it was said, could delay getting to America.

When my sister Maryan finally got her green card in 2005, my interest in the United States grew. I started reading American romance novels — Nicholas Sparks and Danielle Steel — and the occasional horrors, mostly Stephen King. All paperbacks, old and torn, from the library at my secondary school. Soon I was devouring Morrison, Walker, Fitzgerald, Salinger, among many others.

I dreamed of being a writer, and Maryan gave me hope. In America, she said, you can be anything you want. So I dreamed of doing for Somalia what Khaled Hosseini did for Afghanistan — move beyond the bloody headlines and poignantly tell the stories of my people. Maryan went along with my delusions. She cheered my insanity. She said it was all possible — and I believed her. It was possible for Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiongó, both of whom fled Africa for America. And it was possible for hundreds of immigrant writers who distinguished themselves in the United States: Vladimir Nabokov, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and many others. I was going to be like them.

My parents worried that America would change us if we ever got there, that we would lose our religion, our culture. But they too shared the dream of a better future. They fled Somalia in 1991, when the Siad Barre regime was ousted and the country descended into chaos. My father decided to take his family to a refugee camp in Kenya, where at least it was safe. Many of his close relatives disagreed with his decision. The war, they said, would last only for a couple of months. How could he turn his back on his country? But gradually, those same relatives began to join us in the refugee camp. “By then they had lost family members in the war,” my father remembers. “A son, a daughter, a husband, a wife. I departed early and I don’t regret that.”

Neither he nor my mother expected to stay long in Kenya. Upon her arrival in Dadaab refugee camp, my mother recalls being asked to plant trees to help make the desert settlement more livable. She declined, saying she wouldn’t be there long enough to sit under their shade. Twenty-five years later, she is still there and her resettlement case is still pending. Our family has been through the same required medical examination 17 times. The last time, in January 2016, my 80-year-old father said he was too tired to go. My older brother Ibrahim and I begged him to make one last attempt.

Then in March, Maryan returned to Kenya to say that she had petitioned the U.S. government to allow our parents to join her in the United States (she wasn’t allowed to include her siblings on the petition). The petition was accepted, and my parents were waiting to be interviewed at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi when news of Trump’s executive order swept through the camp. Why always our family?

But it’s not just the United States that doesn’t want us. Last year, the Kenyan government announced that it would close down Dadaab, citing concerns about terrorism. It set a deadline of November (since extended to May), and began sending anyone who would “agree” to leave back to Somalia. It says it won’t force the more than 250,000 remaining refugees out, but it hasn’t said we can stay, either. No one seems to know what will happen to us.Will people like me, who were born in Dadaab, be deported back to Somalia? Kenya won’t say.

Many of my childhood friends have made it to the United States, Britain, or Canada, and I often meet them online. They ask if I am still in Dadaab. They ask where I learned English, as if they have forgotten that we have schools here. They are shocked when they learn that I was published in the Guardian, the New York Times Magazine.

You made it while still in Dadaab, they say!

Hardly. My life would have looked so much different if I had been allowed to come with Maryan to America in 2005. Look at Ilhan Omar, who was recently elected the first Somali lawmaker in the United States. Or Fatah Adan, who emerged atop his class and made it to Harvard. Or Muna Khalif, who was accepted at all eight Ivy League schools.

The words I write may travel all around the world, but I am confined to the refugee camp where I was born. I can’t move freely in Kenya; I need a permit to leave Dadaab. My whole life, it seems, I’ve been living the American dream. I just don’t know how much longer I can bear to live it outside of America.

Image credit: TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images

Chinese Economy and the Crisis of Humanism!

Pity China’s ‘bare branches’: unmarried men stuck between tradition and capitalism

by Xuan Li-Jan 28, 2017

Jan 29, 2017

( January 28, 2017, Shanghai, Sri Lanka Guardian) Chinese New Year, or the Spring Festival, is a highlight in Chinese society. But for many young people, the joy of vacation and family reunion is mixed with questions from parents and relatives about their achievements in the past year, including about their relationships.

This is a particularly stressful occasion for single men who – unless they choose to rent a fake partner or have a stroke of luck at the local marriage “market” – are forced to face the miserable fate of singlehood.

These involuntary bachelors, who fail to add fruit to their family tree are often referred to as “bare branches”, or guanggun. And the Chinese state has recently started to worry about the dire demographic trend posed by the growing number of bare branches.

The 2010 national census data suggests that 24.7% Chinese men above the age of 15 have never been married, while 18.5% of women in the same age group remain unwed.

The disparity in marital status between the sexes is particularly large in younger age groups. According to the same data source, 82.44% of Chinese men between 20 and 29 years of age have never been married, which is 15% more than women of the same age. The gap is approximately 6% among those in their 30s and less than 4% for those in their 40s or older.

Hiding in plain sight?

China’s surplus of men is attributed, at least in part, to the family planning policy implemented in the country since 1979. The One Child Policy, coupled with the patriarchal tradition of son preference, has led many families to give up on their daughters. This has happened through gender-selective abortion, infanticide or by giving away girl children.

The bitter fruit of the preference for sons is a female deficit of 20 million people in the coming decades for men of marrying age.

But there is an argument that the sex birth ratio might not be as skewed as all that. It points out that many of the “missing” girls were unregistered at birth in official records. By examining multiple waves of census data, for example, researchers have found that millions of “hidden girls” turned up in later statistics.

That being said, the extreme 118:100 sex birth ratio still points to huge pools of bachelors in China in the decades to come.

What alarms the state is not the singleton status of these men, but their socioeconomic characteristics. China’s wealth is unequally distributed across the population, with particularly huge income gaps between urban and rural populations.

As in most countries, men are expected to be the head and main provider for the family, and women are allowed and encouraged to “marry up” to males with resources. Caught between the patriarchal tradition and the widening social gap, Chinese men on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder have a particularly hard time attracting brides.

The “marriage squeeze” would not be so devastating for these bachelors had the Chinese government been thorough and persistent with its gender equality policy. Gender equality has been written in the constitution since 1954 and has been proudly promoted by the socialist state.

New generations of Chinese women, who now make up 45% of the country’s workforce and are almost on par with their male compatriots in education enrolments, no longer need to be financially dependent on future husbands. They have the potential to shake rigid gender roles that require men to shoulder the economic burden alone.

But the translation from educational attainment to earning power and equal status is not at all straightforward. The labour market in China has become increasingly hostile towards women in recent years and the gender gap in employment rate and income have expanded.

Many young women – especially those without promising career prospects – are looking again to marriage as their once-in-a-lifetime chance for upward social mobility. This is reflected in the increasing dating costs and rocketing “bride wealth” that women request from their male partners, which further disadvantage impoverished men.

Young men – economically disadvantaged and sexually frustrated – might eventually vent their anger through violence against others, thereby threatening public security and social stability. At least, that’s what the Chinese government fears.

The conviction is not ungrounded. Social scientists argue that long-term bachelorhood not only compromises men’s well-being, but also puts hormone-fuelled, underprivileged men at risk of gravitating towards aggression, as already observed in historical China and contemporary India.

Easy targets

Social gaps are so difficult to close that the Chinese authorities are firing at the easier target: women.

Over the years, the Chinese state has tolerated sexist representations of women in high-profile media outlets, put derogatory labels on unmarried women by calling them “leftover” and describing them as “emotional” and “extreme”, and
curtailed women’s rights after divorce.

But little is discussed in official channels about abandoned girls, domestic and international human trafficking, and supporting women in workplaces.

Of course, not all “bare branches” are disadvantaged because of socioeconomic reasons. Homosexuality was formally decriminalised in China as recently as 1997 and removed from the list of mental illness in 2001.

Still excluded from the institution of marriage or any civil union, many Chinese gay men either have to stay legally single or form a sham union – often with lesbians who have the same problem. But some choose to or have had to marry straight women, causing tremendous distress to both parties.

No longer wanting to spend their lives alone or to deceive innocent straight women, Chinese gay men are starting on the long, hard fight for marriage equality. Victory is still a long way away; China abstained from voting on the UN resolution on the rights of LGBT people in 2011. And in June 2016, a Chinese court dismissed a gay couple’s lawsuit for their right to marriage.

Despite the conservative stance of the government and the dominating power of capital, there are signs of progress. In a recent survey on relationship values conducted by Tencent.com, – one of the leading internet companies in China – both male and female respondents listed “individual space” (32.8%) and “real connections” (24.6%) as their top requirements for starting a marriage. Only 9.3% males and 16.6% females put “house and car” as a requirement, suggesting a rejection of the purely materialistic model of marriage.

Similarly, in study on dating attitudes and expectations among Chinese college students, both sexes put “kind”, “loving”, “considerate” as the most desirable qualities in a romantic partner.

If they play nice and work with women to push for gender equality, perhaps there’s hope for the bare branches yet.

Xuan Li, Assistant Professor of Psychology, NYU Shanghai

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Pakistan acquits 112 in case of torching Christian homes over blasphemy rumour

FILE PHOTO: Police beat and detain a Pakistani Christian protester during a demonstration against Saturday's burning of Christian houses and belongings in Badami Bagh, Lahore March 10, 2013. REUTERS/Mohsin Raza/File Photo

Sun Jan 29, 2017

A Pakistani court acquitted 112 suspects in the 2013 torching of hundreds of Christian homes in the eastern city of Lahore over a rumour that one of the residents there had blasphemed, a lawyer said on Sunday.

In March 2013, more than 125 homes in Lahore's Josep Colony were burned by a mob of more than 3,000 Muslims responding to rumours that a local Christian man, Sawan Masih, had made derogatory remarks about the Prophet Mohammad.

No one was killed in the incident but there was widespread damage to the property of the mostly destitute Christians living in the neighbourhood. Two churches and dozens of Bibles were also desecrated in the attack.

Defence lawyer Ghulam Murtaza Chaudhry said an anti-terrorism court in Lahore had acquitted 112 people accused of torching and ransacking hundreds of houses.

"They were acquitted by the court because of lack of evidences against them," Murtaza told Reuters. "The state witnesses could not identify the accused and their statements were also contradictory."

All 112 suspects were already out on bail.

A road sweeper in his late twenties, Sawan Masih told police after his arrest on blasphemy charges that the real reason for the blasphemy allegation was a property dispute between him and a friend who spread the rumour.

In Pakistan, conviction under the blasphemy laws can carry a mandatory death sentence.

Masih was sentenced to death in 2014, a decision he has appealed.

Critics of Pakistan's blasphemy laws say they have long been used by individuals and religious groups to settle disputes.

This month, the Pakistani Senate's human rights panel said it would debate how to prevent the country's blasphemy laws being applied unfairly, the first time in decades that any parliamentary body had considered a formal proposal to stop the abuse of the blasphemy laws.

Many conservatives in Pakistan consider even criticising the laws as blasphemy, and in 2011 a Pakistani governor, Salman Taseer, was assassinated by his bodyguard after calling for reform of the laws.

His killer Mumtaz Qadri was hailed as a hero by religious hard-liners. Tens of thousands of supporters attended his funeral after he was executed last year and a shrine was built over his grave soon after his burial.

Hundreds of Pakistanis are on death row for blasphemy convictions.

(Reporting by Mubasher Bukhari; writing by Mehreen Zahra-Malik; Editing by Stephen Powell)

Muslim member of Myanmar ruling party is shot dead at airport

Ko Ni, legal adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, and his taxi driver are killed by unknown gunman in Yangon

Taxis in central Yangon. Photograph: Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images

Sunday 29 January 2017

A prominent Muslim lawyer and member of Myanmar’s ruling party has been shot dead along with a taxi driver outside Yangon’s international airport, officials say.

Ko Ni, a member of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, was gunned down as he got into a taxi outside arrivals at around 5pm local time by an unidentified gunman, who also killed the driver.

“According to our initial information, Ko Ni and the taxi driver were killed,” a security source at the airport said, asking not to be named.

“An unknown man shot him in the head while he was hiring a taxi. He was later arrested,” the source added.

Zaw Htay, a spokesman at the president’s office, said Ko Ni had just returned from a government delegation trip to Indonesia.

“He was shot while he was waiting for a car outside the airport. Ko Ni died on the spot,” he said.

Myanmar’s border regions have simmered for decades with ethnic minority insurgencies, and in recent years Myanmar has witnessed a surge of anti-Muslim sentiment, supported by hardline Buddhist nationalists.

Ko Ni, a long time member of the NLD and legal adviser to the party, often spoke out in favour of religious tolerance and pluralism.

In late 2015 Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD party won a landslide election victory, ending decades of military led rule.

But in what analysts widely saw as a sop to Buddhist hardliners, the party fielded no Muslim candidates, despite boasting many prominent Muslim figures in its ranks.

Aung San Suu Kyi has also faced international censure for her failure to criticise an ongoing army crackdown against the Muslim Rohingya minority in western Rakhine state.

Since the launch of the crackdown in October at least 66,000 Rohingya have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh alleging security forces are carrying out a campaign of rape, torture and mass killings.

The treatment of the Rohingya, a stateless group denied citizenship in Myanmar, has galvanised anger across the Muslim world.

Many among Myanmar’s Buddhist majority call them Bengalis – shorthand for illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh – even though many have lived in Myanmar for generations.

Burma: Is the Burmese state media altering witness accounts of Rohingya rape?

UNHCR workers question ethnic Rohingya women at a temporary shelter in Lapang, Aceh province, Indonesia, in May 2015. Pic: AP.

29th January 2017

QUESTIONS have been raised as to whether the Burmese (Myanmar) government is changing witness accounts about the rape of Rohingya women presumably by the Burmese military.

Residents and refugees have long accused the military of killing, raping and detaining civilians while burning villages in northwestern Rakhine State.

Aung San Suu Kyi has formed a commission to determine if the rapes had occurred. However, as the BBC World Service points out, the commission’s integrity has been under question.

The commission collects its data by going around the Rohingya village asking for eyewitness accounts as to if rape had occurred.

The BBC claims the state broadcaster had used incorrect subtitles during an interview with an eyewitness. They claim the state broadcaster had omitted a portion of what the witness had said when she was asked if she had witnessed a rape happening.

The state broadcaster’s subtitles stated that the eyewitness had not seen any evidence of rape but is how the conversation actually went:

Commission representative: Did you see if those women were raped or not?

Eyewitness: I did not.

Commission representative: So it’s not true.

Eyewitness: Yes and no… They were bleeding directly from here (she points to between her legs)

Commission representative: Don’t say that. Don’t say bleeding. Just say whether you saw the rape or not. 

The government, which is led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San, vehemently denies the accusations. They insist the counter-insurgency operation underway is in accordance with the law.

U.N. Rapporteur on Human Rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee talks to reporters during her press conference in a hotel at Yangon, Myanmar January 20, 2017. REUTERS

This comes after the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Burma said during her recent trip to Burma that she found government claims that the Rohingya have burned their own houses “quite incredible”.

Yanghee Lee suggested that recent footage of police beating Rohingya villagers could be “not an isolated incident, but a more common practice”.

The UN Rights official also criticised the Burmese government’s crackdown on the minority and warned that the Burmese government’s dismissal and denial of allegations by the Rohingya in Rakhine of the atrocities committed towards them are counter-productive.

SEE ALSO: Burma: UN Rights official warns of likely retaliation against some in Rakhine State

Authorities say the military launched a security sweep against the Rohingya in response to what they claim was an attack by Rohingya insurgents on border posts near Myanmar’s border with Bangladesh in Oct last year.

Nine police officers were killed in the attack, while at least 86 people have been killed in the sweep. The United Nations estimates at least 65, 000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh in the wake of the sweep.

SEE ALSO: Watch: Footage shows alleged Rohingya assault by Burmese policemen

Lee insists the attacks on border posts happened within the “context of decades of systematic and institutionalised discrimination against” the Muslim minority.

“Desperate individuals take desperate actions,” said Lee.

Lee’s visited the north of Rakhine earlier this month, where the military operation is taking place, as well as the commercial hub Yangon, the capital Naypyitaw and Kachin State in the north, where government forces are battling ethnic Kachin guerrillas.

She will present her report to the UN Human Rights Council in March, which will include her observations and recommendations to the Burmese government.

Additional reporting by Reuters

Virtual reality 'could help treat vertigo'

By Max Evans-28 January 2017

Virtual reality could be used to diagnose and treat visual vertigo, according to a team of Cardiff University psychologists.

People with the condition suffer from dizziness and nausea and often cite places with repetitive visual patterns, such as supermarkets, as the trigger.

A team of psychologists is working to develop virtual environments to help with diagnosis and rehabilitation.

The scientists believe the approach has "real potential".

Dr Georgina Powell, of the School of Psychology, said: "We don't know very much about what causes visual vertigo at the moment.

"There also are not many effective rehabilitation therapies available, so the aim of our project is to try and understand those two things."

She said vertigo can be extremely debilitating, adding: "It can mean that a patient can't leave their house because they feel so sick and nauseous every time they walk around in their visual environment.

"They can't work, they just can't function."

The Cardiff University team explains how virtual reality could help with "debilitating" visual vertigo.

The team said one of the most striking observations they had made about sufferers was the variation between what sparks their symptoms.

"All the patients are very different and some environments might trigger symptoms for some patients whilst other environments might trigger symptoms for others," Dr Powell said.

"So by using virtual reality (VR) we can have vast flexibility over the different types of environments that we can show to patients and we can find out what their individual triggers might be and then tailor specific rehabilitation therapies."

'We have a bucket ready'

Visual vertigo is often referred to as "supermarket syndrome" because large shops, with their cluttered shelves and repetitive aisles, can act as a catalyst to attacks.

"Other environments include walking by the side of a river, where you have motion one side of you but not on the other," Dr Powell said.

"Generally they can only handle so much of the virtual reality images at one time - we have a bucket ready," She added.

"But we give them lots of breaks and lots of water and monitor how they are feeling."

What is vertigo?

• Vertigo is a symptom rather than a condition
• Sufferers can endure dizziness, a sense of self-motion, a loss of balance and nausea
• If you have severe vertigo, your symptoms may be constant and last for several days or even longer
• The term vertigo is often incorrectly used to describe a fear of heights, which is actually acrophobia

Source: NHS UK

Often, people with visual vertigo develop vertigo after suffering damage or illness related to their vestibular system - the apparatus of the inner ear involved in balance and space orientation - such as an ear infection. It can also be related to migraines.

Prof Petroc Sumner, who is overseeing the project, said it can be "very difficult" to rehabilitate.

"There are new patients every month and also repeat patients. So, because it can't easily be fixed quickly, then the patients have to be seen multiple times - that takes up a lot of NHS time."

He said the concept had "real potential", especially as virtual reality becomes cheaper.