A busy criminal enterprise that breaks laws the way a baker breaks eggsʼ!

TRUMP’S ʽWEALTH᾿ WAS‚ IN TRUTH‚ ALL DAD’S MONEY . . . 

by Selvam Canagaratna-February 23, 2019, 7:22 pm

"If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything."
– Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935.

Donald Trump has the unenviable notoriety of never having read a book in his life. Having successfully got away with literally conning his way all through the better part of seventy long years, he should have been shrewd enough – if not exactly ʽwise᾿ enough – to know a good thing when he had it. But, then, that᾿s classic Trump all over again. Truth to tell, he's too stupid to even to recognize the reality, and decided to have a shy at, of all things, the Presidency of the USA. He᾿s now paying the price for that folly.

Writing on February 7, Senior Editor of Truthout magazine William Rivers Pitt recalled having ruminated upon the idea – as far back as May 2018 – that, for his own sake at least, Donald Trump really shouldn’t run for President. He remembered that, at that time, no one cared about Trump’s mysteriously unavailable tax returns, and that a lot of folks seemed to have forgotten about it.

The issue itself, he believed, was subsumed by the avalanche of mayhem that is the President’s daily fare. The administration went from lying about it ("I can’t release them; I’m being audited," was demonstrably false) to flat-out stonewalling the matter. Anyone asking to see them now is invited to take a long walk off a short pier, but that bit of legerdemain may be coming to a close.

The folks over on the majority side of the House Ways and Means Committee, however, have not forgotten about Trump᾿s tax returns. They intend to deploy a little-known law that allows the Committee to gain access to the tax returns of any US citizen they choose – and they happen to have chosen Donald Trump. Once the returns are in hand, a majority vote by the Committee will release them to the entire House, and from there, one assumes, to the world.

Writing in The Washington Post, Paul Waldman noted: "The things in Trump’s past are appalling enough, but it’s his current debts and business interests that we really need to understand. Trump himself obviously can’t be relied on to inform us of any conflicts of interest he might have; just look at how often he lied about Russia, claiming to have no business interests there when in fact during the campaign he was pursuing a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow that could have netted him hundreds of millions of dollars."

If truth be told, the Trump administration has seen this coming for months, and is preparing to go to court to keep the tax returns under wraps, noted William Rivers Pitt. "The law is the law is the law, however, so Trump’s best hope appears to be a long effort to tie the release of his returns up in legal proceedings until after the 2020 presidential election. Given we already know about the decades-long brazen misdeeds of the entire Trump family, it is no surprise that the administration is willing to go to such lengths to keep this corner of Trump’s finances an ongoing secret.

Pitt also noted that "beyond the matter of the tax returns was the continued existence of Trump’s erstwhile lawyer, fixer and bagman, Michael Cohen. Cohen was scheduled to testify before the House Intelligence Committee recently, but that date was pushed back to February 28 "in the interests of the investigation," according to Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. This latest delay comes on the heels of Cohen canceling his scheduled testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which was also slated to take place that week."

Wrote Pitt: "While these delays certainly serve to ratchet up the drama (and the White House paranoia), they do not mean that Cohen has suddenly gone opaque and insubstantial. Far from it. The United States attorney for the Southern District of New York plopped a subpoena on Trump’s Inauguration Committee this week, right on the doorstep of the ʽState of the Union᾿ Address. That subpoena, according to reports, was inspired by a secret recording Cohen made of a conversation he had with a woman named Stephanie Wolkoff, who received a $26 million payment from the Inauguration Committee."

This situation is heavy, and will get heavier with the passage of time as prosecutors flip witnesses and draw closer to the core of the scheme, wrote Pitt. According to CNN, the subpoena lists a variety of possible crimes being investigated, including conspiracy against the United States, false statements, mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, Inaugural Committee disclosure violations, and "violations of laws prohibiting contributions by foreign nations and contributions in the name of another person, also known as straw donors."

"The new requests expand an investigation prosecutors opened late last year amid a flurry of scrutiny of the Inaugural Committee," wrote Maggie Haberman and Ben Protess for The New York Times. "And they showed that the investigations surrounding Mr. Trump, once centered on potential ties to Russia during the 2016 presidential election, have spread far beyond the Special Counsel’s office to include virtually all aspects of his adult life: his business, his campaign, his inauguration and his presidency."

According to the Times, the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York is also investigating whether foreign money was funneled to the Inaugural Committee by straw donors.[Noted Pitt, tongue-in-cheek: "Thank you, Mr. Cohen. The scum, it seems, also rises."]

Hovering over all this is Mueller, the man tasked with investigating a very busy criminal enterprise administration that breaks laws the way a baker breaks eggs, wrote Pitt. Mueller’s corner of this is Russian involvement with the 2016 election and obstruction of justice regarding same. He has most recently invited Trump ally and dirty trickster Roger Stone into his parlour, and right-wing nonsense factory Jerome Corsi may soon follow. Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker recently made noises to the effect that Mueller’s investigation will soon be coming to a close, but this may only be wishful thinking from a person who shouldn’t be holding the office to begin with.

Mueller is probably not pursuing the issue of Trump’s tax returns or the dealings of the Inaugural Committee because he simply doesn’t have enough room on his desk. Remember that the next time you hear someone accuse him of leading a "runaway" investigation. Beyond him are all the House committees now run by Democrats with subpoena power and the will to use it.

For Trump, this elevator only goes down; there is absolutely no reason to believe these investigations will simply evaporate once he leaves office. He has inspired no loyalty among the cohort of scumbags he surrounded himself with, and they will sell him out the first chance they get once Mueller tightens the screws.

Concluded Pitt: "Because justice in the US favours the wealthy and the white, and because the Justice Department itself is not fully convinced it can or should indict a sitting President, there is no reason to assume Trump will, for instance, wind up in prison. Yet the odds are increasingly canting toward his inevitable ruination as both a President and a powerful public figure, a day when his already tattered reputation is rendered to ashes. One way or another, this is likely to end poorly for him. It is only a matter of time and a question of how much damage he will do to the country before he is finally run to ground.

"Like I said, the man should have stayed home."

A Lawsuit by a Campaign Worker Is the Latest Challenge to Trump’s Nondisclosure Agreements

 

By Ronan Farrow- Feb 25, 2019Feb 24, 2019

 

Astaff member of Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign filed a lawsuit in federal court in Florida on Monday, alleging that she experienced “racial and gender discrimination” while working for the campaign, that she was paid less than male and white colleagues, and that Trump once kissed her partially on the mouth, without her consent. The claim related to the kiss may prove difficult to verify. Four people said that the campaign worker, Alva Johnson, told them about the incident afterward, but two other people, who Johnson said were present at the time of the kiss, told me that they did not see it. In a statement, Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, denied that it had taken place.

 

The most legally significant aspect of Johnson’s suit may ultimately be something the complaint does not explicitly address: the pervasive use of nondisclosure agreements by Trump during his campaign and in his Administration. Johnson’s suit is at least the sixth legal case in which Trump campaign or Administration employees have defied their nondisclosure agreements. Three of those actions, including Johnson’s, were filed this month. Johnson, who was the campaign’s administrative field-operations director in Florida, signed a nondisclosure agreement that bars her from revealing any information “in any way detrimental to the Company, Mr. Trump, any Family Member, any Trump Company or any Family Member company.” Johnson’s attorney, Hassan Zavareei, said, “We expect that Trump will try to use the unconscionable N.D.A. and forced arbitration agreement to silence Ms. Johnson. We will fight this strong-arm tactic.”

 

The White House referred questions about the nondisclosure agreements to Michael Glassner, the chief operating officer of Trump’s reëlection campaign. He said in a statement, “The campaign takes our NDA agreements very seriously, and will enforce them aggressively if they are breached.” Johnson said that she considers the issues raised by her suit important enough to merit breaching the contract. “I am suing because my work holds the same value as the work of my white male counterparts,” Johnson said, in an interview. “I am suing because this predatory behavior should not be minimized, especially when committed by the most powerful man in the world.”

Nondisclosure agreements are routinely employed in the business world, but experts say that there is little comprehensive data on how they are used by Presidential campaigns. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign reportedly required paid staff to sign such agreements, but Trump’s campaign seemed to use the agreements more widely, and even required unpaid volunteers to sign them. The practice has carried over to the Trump White House. The Washington Postreported last year that dozens of White House aides had signed N.D.A.s, a break in tradition from previous Administrations, which used the contracts more sparingly. White House interns have also reportedly been asked to sign the agreements as part of their mandatory “ethics training.”

 

Two former Trump advisers who had senior roles in the campaign said that workers were pressured into signing such agreements. Internal e-mails received by one of the former advisers repeatedly insist that “we must have that NDA.” The second adviser told me that Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager, “was tasked by Mr. Trump to insure that anyone and everyone working with the campaign, whether salaried employee, volunteer, surrogate, or otherwise, execute a nondisclosure agreement or they would be terminated immediately. They strong-armed people to sign.”

 

The first adviser, who went on to hold a position in the White House, recalled that Stefan Passantino, the deputy White House counsel in charge of overseeing ethics, personally demanded a signature on an N.D.A. “They would not allow me to take the document off campus, would not allow me to e-mail the document to my attorneys. That’s where the red flags started,” the adviser told me. The adviser declined to sign, and felt that the decision had a negative impact on the adviser’s standing in the Administration. (Passantino did not respond to a request for comment.) A third former campaign official called the reports of workers being pressured to sign the agreements exaggerated. He said that staffers who declined to sign were not terminated, and noted that there were “always concerns” within the campaign about the enforceability of the agreements.

 

Johnson’s lawsuit will almost certainly face intense scrutiny, both because of her claims and because of the nature of the incident at the heart of the lawsuit. The complaint acknowledges that “forcible kissing might appear at first glance to be on the lesser extreme” of misconduct, but it argues that the interaction meets common-law definitions of battery, a legal term referring to harmful or offensive contact.

 

The lawsuit says that Johnson joined the Trump campaign in January, 2016, as the director of outreach and coalitions in Alabama, and that she held various positions in the ensuing months, eventually working as the administrative field-operations director in Florida. Johnson, who is African-American, asserts in her lawsuit that she was paid “substantially less” than other staff members with similar responsibilities because of her race and gender, and that campaign staffers made comments about race that made her uncomfortable. (One of those staffers disputed Johnson’s account, accusing her of having an “agenda.”) An analysis by the Boston Globe in June, 2016, found that female staffers on the Trump campaign were paid, on average, three-quarters what their male counterparts received.

 

Alva Johnson, wearing a white shirt and standing back left, at a rally with Donald Trump in Tampa, Florida, on August 24, 2016.

Photograph by Loren Elliott / Tampa Bay Times / Getty

The incident in which Johnson said that Trump kissed her occurred during an event that she had helped organize in Tampa in August, 2016, according to the complaint. In an R.V. before Trump’s speech at the event, the complaint alleges, Trump took Johnson by the hand and leaned in to kiss her; she attempted to turn away, but, she claims, his mouth made contact with the corner of hers.

 

In her statement, Sarah Sanders said, “This accusation is absurd on its face. This never happened and is directly contradicted by multiple highly credible eyewitness accounts.” The two people who disputed Johnson’s account, Karen Giorno, a staffer, and Pam Bondi, a campaign surrogate, said that they had been close enough that they would likely have witnessed the incident. “I don’t even recall Alva being on the R.V.,” Giorno told me. (Photographs from the rally place Johnson inside the R.V.) Bondi, who said that she travelled with Trump extensively and never witnessed inappropriate behavior, added, “Had it happened, I feel I would have seen it, because I was there the entire time.”

 

Three of Johnson’s family members—her partner, her mother, and her stepfather—said that she told them about the incident immediately afterward, and recalled that she was in tears. Johnson said that at first she continued to go to work. In October, 2016, the Washington Post released audio of Trump saying, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” At that point, Johnson said, she saw the incident with Trump as part of a pattern. She said that she took several sick days and consulted an attorney, whom she told in a text message that Trump had kissed her. She also spoke with a therapist, whose notes state that “she was having nightmares because of what happened.” The attorney, Adam Horowitz, advised Johnson to notify the campaign that she was resigning. Shortly afterward, the campaign sent Johnson a termination letter.

 

After Trump’s election, Johnson said, she wanted to “leave the incident in the past,” and she attended an inaugural ball and applied for a job in the Administration. She said she feared that the President or his supporters would attack her character if she filed a public complaint. (Johnson was arrested for marijuana possession in 2000, and in 2006 her sister and her father filed a motion for a protection order against her in family court in Georgia, after what her attorney said were heated arguments.)

 

Johnson’s lawsuit is at least the fourth filed against Trump by women with complaints of unwanted physical advances. None of the previous suits have resulted in judgments against Trump, but settlement negotiations are ongoing in at least one. At least nine additional women have publicly claimed that Trump kissed them without their consent, but none of them have pursued legal action.

 

Johnson’s complaint comes just days after Jessica Denson, who worked on the campaign as a national phone-bank administrator and then as a Hispanic-engagement director, filed a class-action claim seeking to invalidate nondisclosure and arbitration agreements signed by any Trump campaign workers. The claim, filed with the American Arbitration Association, argues that the contracts are too broad and represent an “unconscionable” restraint on employees with workplace complaints. In November, 2017, Denson sued the campaign in New York State Supreme Court, accusing one of her supervisors of “pervasive slander, aggravated harassment, attempted theft, cyberbullying and sexual discrimination and harassment.” Trump Organization lawyers then sought to enforce the agreements she had signed, which, they argued, prevented her from raising her complaint outside of private arbitration. The case has resulted in a protracted legal battle. Denson’s attorney, David Bowles, said that her claim was filed to defend “the rights of campaign workers to be free to speak, as they should be under the law.”

 

Trump’s efforts to enforce the contracts have extended to the White House, despite the fact that many legal experts believe that public servants are exempt from sweeping nondisclosure agreements. Last week, Cliff Sims, a former Trump White House staffer, filed a lawsuit arguing that Trump’s use of nondisclosure agreements violates the First Amendment. Trump’s campaign organization had filed an arbitration claim against Sims in response to an unflattering book that he wrote about his time in the Administration. Mark Zaid, an attorney whose firm currently represents Sims, said that the Trump Administration was applying private-sector tactics to the government in an unprecedented way.

 

Trump’s attorneys are also engaged in an ongoing arbitration process with Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former White House staffer and a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” which they initiated after she published a book that accused the Administration of racism and misogyny. “They’re using N.D.A.s to suppress speech, to avoid accountability, and thus to avoid setting legal precedent,” Manigault Newman’s attorney, John Phillips, told me. He said that enforcement efforts as extensive as Trump’s had “never happened before in the government sector.”

 

Legal experts said that Johnson’s case, and the broader pattern of high-profile legal skirmishes over Trump’s use of nondisclosure agreements, could produce significant legal rulings and affect the President’s ability to enforce the contracts. “We now have the President of the United States trying to enforce nondisclosure agreements that are so over-broad they would keep secret illegal actions or keep information that’s in the public interest from the public,” Mark Fenster, a professor at the University of Florida Law School who specializes in government transparency, said. “This is a moment of reckoning for excessiveN.D.A.s.”

Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif announces resignation

Official who negotiated nuclear deal apologises to nation but gives no reason for exit
Javad Zarif, who made the announcement on Instagram, played a key role in the 2015 nuclear deal. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

Mon 25 Feb 2019

The Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, has resigned without warning, offering an apology to the nation as the nuclear deal he negotiated with world powers stands on the verge of collapse after the US withdrew from it.

The veteran diplomat first offered a vague Instagram post with an “apology” for his “inability to continue to his service”. The post included a drawing of Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad, as Monday marked the commemoration of her birth.

A foreign ministry spokesman, Abbas Mousavi, confirmed to the state-run IRNA news agency minutes later that Zarif had resigned but gave no reason for his departure.

On Sunday, Zarif criticised Iranian hardliners in a speech in Tehran, saying: “We cannot hide behind imperialism’s plot and blame them for our own incapability.

“Independence does not mean isolation from the world,” he said.

Zarif’s resignation leaves Iran’s relatively moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, without one of his main allies in pushing the Islamic Republic toward more negotiation with the west.

Analysts have said Rouhani faces growing political pressure from hardliners in the government as the unravelling nuclear deal further strains the country’s economy.

The US-educated son of a wealthy family, Zarif overcame hardline objections and western suspicions to strike the accord with world powers in which Iran promised to limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.

The deal later faced a challenge from Donald Trump, who withdrew the US from the accord, fuelling doubts of those in Iran still wary of the US decades after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Zarif himself faced withering criticism at home once for even shaking hands with the then president, Barack Obama.

There was no immediate reaction from the US. However, officials in the Trump administration have increased their pressure on Iran on social media. One state department official tweeted an unflattering gif of Zarif saying: “How do you know @JZarif is lying? His lips are moving.”

Zarif served as Iran’s ambassador to the UN from 2002 to 2007, first under the reformist president Mohammad Khatami and then under the hardline Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad wanted him replaced, but the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, intervened to keep him in the position for another two years as Iran soon found itself an international pariah over its nuclear programme. Iran insisted the programme was for peaceful purposes, while the west claimed it could be used to make nuclear weapons.

Secret talks between the US and Iran in Oman became full-fledged negotiations over its nuclear programme. During the talks, Zarif met the then US secretary of state, John Kerry, more than 50 times – something unimaginable only years earlier.

A Wider Bridge: the “gay rights” group funded by homophobes

The pro-Israel LGBTQ group A WIder Bridge has been accused of pinkwashing. An examination of the group’s funding seems to bear that accusation out. 

 (ActiveStills)

Stephanie Skora-25 February 2019

If you’ve encountered LGBTQ Jewish life in the United States, odds are you’ve heard of A Wider Bridge. The LGBTQ-specific Israel advocacy organization, whose mission in its own words is “Equality IN Israel and Equality FOR Israel,” has tried hard to portray itself as progressive and to create a pro-Israel bent in LGBTQ life in the United States.

The organization has repeatedly drawn accusations of pinkwashing – the attempt to use the supposedly positive record of the Israeli state on LGBTQ rights to cover up the state’s brutal oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – to which it responds by declaring that pinkwashing is a myth.

A Wider Bridge insists that accusations of pinkwashing are nothing more than an attempt to silence progressive, LGBTQ Jews and other Zionists who support the Israeli state, and it often leans hard on its carefully cultivated progressive image to give its pushback credibility. A closer look at the organization’s internal politics and institutional funding sources, however, paints a much different picture.

A funding problem

A Wider Bridge receives funding directly from organizations with a long and troubling pattern of giving to groups that could be classified as right-wing, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, pro-settlement; campus-specific organizations dedicated to those causes; or agents and politicians in the Republican Party. All eight of their publicly available institutional funders have repeatedly given to organizations that fit these categories.

Of particular note among that group are the Paul E. Singer Foundation; the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund of San Francisco, The Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties (otherwise known as the JCF); and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.

The Singer Foundation is the personal giving vehicle of Republican mega-donor, billionaire and vulture capitalist Paul Singer. Singer, who made a large portion of his money buying distressed debt from developing nations such as Peru, Argentina and Congo, donates extensively to Republican interests, and an examination of his individual political giving and tax Form 990s from his foundation revealed donations to the anti-gayHeritage Foundation, the Canary Mission-linked Central Fund of Israel, and a $1 million donation to the Inaugural Committee for Donald Trump.

Likewise, an examination of the Schustermans’ taxes shows similar donations to the Central Fund of Israel, extensive support for right-wing, pro-Israel campus organizations, many of which were featured in the censored Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby – USA.

This author has already published a report on the JCF’s giving to right-wing groups.

Money talks

A Wider Bridge’s extensive history of right-wing political actions fits more clearly into its organizational story in light of its institutional funding. The organization frequently creates backlash and smear campaigns that are similar to other right-wing groups funded by their common institutional donors.

It notably cosponsored multiple pinkwashing events with the pro-Israel and anti-gay organization StandWithUs, a series of which became the subject of a 2015 documentary by scholar and activist Dean Spade, called Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back.

It was behind the largely fabricated backlash in the wake of the 2016 Creating Change conference in Chicago.

A Wider Bridge created the controversy around the 2017 Chicago Dyke March, during which a then-current employee of A Wider Bridge, Laurel Grauer, disrupted the march by harassing Palestinian attendees and disrupting chants about Palestine. The Chicago Dyke March Collective later proved that Grauer came to the event with the intent to disrupt, or cause a controversy.

And just weeks ago, A Wider Bridge attempted to smear a group of queer, trans, Muslim and Jewish activists (including myself), as anti-Semitic, homophobic and transphobic after we disrupted the opening plenary of the 2019 Creating Change conference in Detroit to call attention to the censorship of programming related to Palestine.

This is the true essence of pinkwashing: using an LGBTQ-friendly or intra-community LGBTQ image to paper over right-wing politics and create a progressive image. To those who have been paying attention to A Wider Bridge’s actions since their founding in 2012, the news of their right-wing political leanings will come as little surprise. However, for those to whom this is news, I’ve written an educational resource about A Wider Bridge’s funding sources and an analysis of the political priorities of their institutional funders.

“Pride With Prejudice: Exposing A Wider Bridge’s Right-Wing Funding” is a 36-page report that goes into detail on the nonprofit’s institutional funders; each of their respective histories of right-wing giving; provides an expanded definition of pinkwashing; and a method of analysis for a nonprofit’s political leanings. The report is intended as an exposé and a call to action; an organization with links to anti-gay, anti-Muslim and Republican groups has no place representing LGBTQ Jewry, and no place calling itself “progressive.”

Anti-pinkwashing organizers, or simply those who feel duped by A Wider Bridge’s marketing, now have the tools to fight back.

Stephanie Skora is an organizer, writer, Ashkenazi Jewish trans woman and dyke who organizes for Palestinian, Jewish, queer and trans justice and liberation.

'I wish we had all died together' - how Idlib's siege is devastating families

Intense shelling by pro-Syrian government forces continues to claim young lives, leaving many parents bereft

Rescuers help a wounded woman following a strike in the town of Khan Sheikhun on 15 February 2019 (AFP)

By 

Zouhir Al Shimale-

25 February 2019 

When cluster bombs fell, twice, on schools in rural Idlib, teachers decided they had to close the region’s schools or risk their children’s lives.

But the intensity of shelling by government forces, violating agreements that set Idlib up as a buffer zone, has meant children have been among the more than 70 killed during the past week, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

While attention has been focused on the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces push to seize the last vestiges of the Islamic State’s (IS) territorial control in the eastern Euphrates, five children were killed by shelling in the town of Maaret al-Noman.

“I was working when the attacks took place. My sons were playing with their cousin Ibrahim. The four of them died,” said Khador Zynab, 39, whose wife died from cancer two years earlier.

Struggling for a steady income since his wife’s death, he was selling fruit outside his home when he heard an explosion nearby.

“I rushed to the scene and found them all laying down, not breathing, silent and covered with dust,” he said. “I’ve lost all my family. I have nothing left – no one to care about in this life.”

Earlier in February, Russia, Syria and Turkey issued the latest of several statements after talks to “stabilise” Idlib by making it a demilitarised zone and removing forces like Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, a coalition formerly aligned with al-Qaeda.

Turkey reinforces military observation posts in Syria's Idlib

Read More »

But Turkey, which has been trying to delay a full-force government offensive, has set up reinforced observation posts around Idlib recently because of the increased attacks on Maaret al-Noman and nearby Khan Sheikhun by the government and their Russian allies.

Mazen Enedane had sent his family away from Khan Sheikhun, to their grandmother’s house where he thought it would be safer, but it was there that they were killed by a mortar strike.

“I sent them to die, it’s all my fault. I should not have sent them away,” the father said in despair. “We didn’t have anywhere else to go to, we [already] survived the chemical attacks and more air strikes afterwards ... I wish I was with them, I wish we had all died together.”

The demilitarisation agreement signed between Syria, Russia and Turkey in Sochi last September has not provided any respite for Khan Sheikhun, Salem Sukare, a head teacher, told MEE.

Shelling has hit schools in several of the town’s neighbourhoods and the intensity has increased over the past few weeks, he said.

“We were forced to send everyone back home. Students assembling in school will only make child casualties rise,” he said. “But despite shutting down the schools to decrease the likelihood of children dying, more are dying every day.”

Overcrowded schools

The schools in Maaret al-Noman’s camps for the internally displaced are struggling not only with the weight of whether to continue but also the numbers of new students they are having to take on.

Khaled Armnaz, a maths teacher in the al-Wafa camp, said the numbers have doubled in recent weeks.

“Many are staying in joint tents and the shortage of places here has made it hard to accommodate families but they come to the classes trying to fill in their time.”

Children attend class in Kufayr in Idlib province on 4 February (AFP)

“We’ve been trying to help children to overcome the displacement when they arrive... most of them tend to be isolated and struggle to learn or blend into the new group. It’s a very hard mission.”

After months of sustained bombardment in her hometown of al-Teh, 12-year-old Lubna Salman was happy to join a new school but she too has struggled to find friends in her new environment.

And even there, the school is not guaranteed because of the bombardment that has followed her.

“We’re waiting for the bombing to stop. We can hear attacks from here too.”

Nowhere to go

The intensified attacks have left parents grappling with the realities of losing their children, often blaming themselves for not moving somewhere safer - though the options for them have been limited.

A recent UN report said that since December attacks by the government and armed groups have left almost a million people, including the displaced, “in an extremely vulnerable situation”.

More than 90 towns across northern Syria have been caught in the fighting, despite being within the demilitarised zone, according to Mohammad Halaj, who manages the Syrian group Humanitarian Emergency Response.

Response Coordination Group@group_response

Field and humanitarian situation in Northern Syria (demilitarized zone)#Response_Coordination_Grouphttps://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2542159222495450&id=1967928126585232 …

2:03 AM - Feb 24, 2019

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He said more than 8,300 families have left their homes since February and many of them have ended up homeless.

“Some people leave for a couple of days then go back to their homes because they can’t find shelter. Dozens of families are staying in farms on open land with not even tents to protect them.”

Zynab said he wished he had left Syria altogether or at least joined those families on the border.

“I wish I could have been able to leave and live away from here,” he said.

“I couldn’t afford to leave my small house but I wish I had left and stayed without shelter next to the border. Now I’m alone; nothing to fight for, no more dreams to build a life for. Everything has faded away now, there’s no way back.”

Zimbabwe struggles to convince doubters as it launches new currency

Zimbabweans demonstrate outside the Zimbabwe Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, January 16, 2019. REUTERS/Shafiek Tassiem/Files

Alfonce Mbizwo, Alexander Winning-FEBRUARY 24, 2019

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe’s government has a trust problem as it introduces a discounted currency in a bid to reverse chronic cash shortages that left people struggling to get hold of basic goods.

Businesspeople and economists welcomed last week’s decision to abandon an unrealistic dollar peg for the country’s surrogate bond notes and electronic dollars, which were merged into a new currency called the Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) dollar.

But they expressed doubts about whether the government has the fiscal and monetary discipline to stick to its commitment to lower the budget deficit and keep inflation in check.

“There is nothing to stop Zimbabwe printing money with this new currency,” said Jee-A van der Linde, an analyst at South Africa-based NKC African Economics. “The government has basically kicked the can down the road in recent years by trying to stimulate the economy through excessive spending.”

Zimbabwe’s currency woes have undermined President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s efforts to win back foreign investors who were sidelined under his ousted predecessor, Robert Mugabe.

The last time Zimbabwe had its own currency, a decade ago, Mugabe’s government was able to turn on the printing presses to fund higher salaries for government workers, curry favour with the military and pay political opponents - with disastrous economic consequences.

Residents of the capital, Harare, now wait outside banks for hours to withdraw a maximum of around $30 in surrogate money or collect remittances from relatives abroad. Snaking queues have become the norm at petrol stations because of a shortage of fuel.

Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube last week pledged to contain public spending and reiterated the importance of the independence of the central bank. Yet, investors and Zimbabweans remain concerned that, should Mnangagwa’s government come under political or military pressure, it may revert to the tricks of the past.

Some also fear that the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ), the country’s central bank, will be unwilling to loosen its grip over the currency as its governor, John Mangudya, is thought to oppose the move to abandon the dollar peg.

“It’s quite clear that the minister of finance wants a liberalised currency regime, whereas the governor of the Reserve Bank doesn’t,” said Eddie Cross, a Zimbabwean economist and former opposition lawmaker.

Whether Zimbabwean policymakers can convince their doubters, both in financial markets and on the streets, will be central to the success or failure of the new RTGS dollar.

If Zimbabweans begin to use banks instead of the black market to exchange any U.S. banknotes they have stashed under their mattresses, then the government could start to rebuild its foreign currency reserves by buying those dollars from banks.

That could give it the wherewithal to relaunch the Zimbabwean dollar when the economy has turned a corner.

Zimbabwe ditched its own currency for the U.S. dollar and other currencies in 2009, after hyperinflation reached 500 billion percent the previous year.

But as a chronic hard currency shortage worsened, it introduced a parallel system of bond notes and electronic dollars, nicknamed “zollars.” The substitute currencies were pegged at 1:1 to the U.S. dollar but traded at a discount on the black market.

MAKE OR BREAK

A key test for the RTGS dollar comes on Monday, when many Zimbabwean banks will buy and sell RTGS dollars on the interbank market for the first time. Some large firms will also be able to buy foreign currency from banks, but it is not clear how much or on what terms.

Many Zimbabweans are sceptical that the latest monetary intervention will reverse the crisis.

“The government has changed things over and over again,” said Godfrey Chinani, who is worried that customers will no longer be able to afford the car parts he sells from a cramped shop in downtown Harare.

He wishes Zimbabwe had switched to the rand instead, as he buys his goods mainly from South Africa.

“People get RTGS as salaries, but when you convert it to rand or U.S. dollars it is worth nothing,” he said. “It won’t work.”

The central bank sold U.S. dollars to a handful of banks at around 2.5 RTGS dollars on Friday, an effective devaluation of 60 percent. More than $5 million changed hands on the interbank market, a senior RBZ official told The Standard newspaper.

Slideshow (3 Images)

In the coming weeks, the new currency is expected to weaken towards 3.5 to the dollar, the level at which bond notes have been trading on the black market.

PRICE PRESSURES

Many Zimbabweans fear a return to the hyperinflation era that prevailed during part of Mugabe’s tenure if the RTGS dollar sinks much beyond that point. Inflation already hit a 10-year high of 57 percent in January, and some public servants say the currency devaluation means the government should raise their salaries by several times.

Authorities have pledged to control the currency’s slide as part of a “managed float,” but how they intend to do that remains a mystery.

The central bank said last week it had secured “sufficient lines of credit” to launch the RTGS. Analysts are scratching their heads as to where the money could have come from.
“People are bound to ask what backs this new currency,” said van der Linde. “It’s no wonder people are distrustful.”

Informal currency traders in downtown Harare said they were waiting to see how the new currency trades on Monday before they change their rates.

POLITICAL SOLUTION

Analysts say one way for Mnangagwa to build confidence in his economic reforms would be to try to mend a deep political rift with the country’s main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Mnangagwa narrowly defeated MDC leader Nelson Chamisa in an election last year which the opposition says was rigged but which Mnangagwa says he won fairly. A violent security crackdown on post-election protests and on demonstrations last month against a major fuel hike have hardened international attitudes towards Mnangagwa’s government and deterred much-needed investment.
“An economic solution on its own, without being backed by a political solution, won’t take us to sustainable economic development,” said Eldred Masunungure, a politics professor at University of Zimbabwe.

“Mnangagwa has not yet built enough trust to relaunch the Zimbabwean dollar. But he is testing the waters.”

Writing by Alexander Winning; Editing by Alexandra Zavis and Philippa Fletcher

Torture and shocking conditions: the human cost of keeping migrants out of Europe

Matt Frei-25 Feb 2019Europe Editor and Presenter

It’s been heralded as the start of a new dialogue. The first summit between the League of Arab States and EU member states ended with a lofty statement of shared values.

European leaders shook hands with their Arab counterparts and discussed issues such as Syria, Yemen and nuclear proliferation. They agreed to tackle the “common challenge” of migration.

Tonight, we’ve new evidence of how Libyan authorities are tackling that challenge.

Footage from inside camps in Libya shows migrants living in shocking conditions. And there are disturbing signs that some migrants are being tortured by people traffickers. This report contains images that some viewers will find distressing.

LGBT Kenyans’ Patience Has Gone Unrewarded

The Kenyan High Court has delayed deciding on decriminalizing homosexuality.

Kenyan LGBT activists attend a court hearing in Nairobi on Feb. 20. (Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images)

BY NEELA GHOSHAL

 | FEBRUARY 24, 2019, 9:06 AM
Kenya’s High Court on Friday postponed a much-awaited decision on a colonial-era law that has long deprived one group of Kenyans of uhuru, or freedom, promising to revisit the issue in May. Criminalization of gay sex remains on the books.

Disappointment reigned among Kenya’s LGBT communities and the human rights advocates who have supported their crusade for equality. The petition challenging the constitutionality of Kenya’s anti-homosexuality laws was filed in 2016, but activists have been planning for this moment for a decade. They built up to it by documenting human rights violations against LGBT Kenyans; galvanizing public debate; conducting targeted outreach to groups including the police, the media, and religious leaders; and filing other constitutional challenges on LGBT-related issues to develop precedent.

Their work may yet pay off. But the moment of relief has yet to come. Kenya’s High Court was asked to find sections 162 and 165 of the penal code, which punish “carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature” and “indecent practices between males” with 14 years and five years in prison, respectively, to violate constitutional rights to equality, nondiscrimination, human dignity, security, privacy, and health.

The judges said they had been unable to finish working through the many pages of submissions from both sides, with one judge, Chacha Mwita, telling the packed-to-the-brim courtroom, “The files are above my height. … We are still working.”

The delay may indeed be a consequence of Kenya’s backlogged court system and not a personal attack on LGBT people, but whatever the reason, withholding judgment means that long-standing human rights abuses that affect real lives on a daily basis will persist. In practice, the unnatural offenses laws have rarely been enforced in recent history. But they institutionalize discrimination and have most likely contributed to violence. When my colleagues at Human Rights Watch and I interviewed LGBT people in Kenya’s coastal region who had been victims of hate crimes, several said police responses were inadequate or stigmatizing. Others refrained from reporting crimes to the police altogether, fearing that they would be viewed as criminals, not victims.

Other rights groups have documented cases of discrimination in housing, education, and employment linked to the laws. When Kenya’s film censors last year banned the award-winning film Rafiki, a touching lesbian love story, they asserted the law was on their side. In one of the few known cases of prosecution under section 162, police resorted to the horrifying, antiquated practice of forced anal examinations to try to find evidence of same-sex conduct by two men who’d been picked up on the basis of a rumor.

Last year, in a case filed by the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, a Kenyan appellate court ruled that the use of forced anal exams violated prohibitions against torture. Like the 2015 High Court ruling compelling the government to register the commission as a nongovernmental organization after its refusal to do so, the anal exams ruling nourished hopes among LGBT activists.
The obstacles to change are significant. In 2018, President Uhuru Kenyatta publicly stated that Kenya had not yet “reached a stage” at which its people were ready to discuss decriminalization of homosexual acts.

Nevertheless, global developments have been encouraging. It had been 20 years since a court ruling on the African continent had found laws against same-sex conduct unconstitutional—the last and only other case being that of South Africa in 1998. But courts in other former British colonies, including Belize, Trinidad and Tobago, and India, have struck down sodomy laws in recent years. Legal challenges to such laws are also pending in Botswana, Malawi, Jamaica, and Singapore. Further, since 2012, Lesotho, São Tomé and Príncipe, Mozambique, Seychelles, and Angola have all quietly repealed such laws, along with other states including Nauru, Palau, and Northern Cyprus.
For the Kenyan petitioners—the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya, the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the Nyanza, Rift Valley, and Western Kenya Network, along with several individuals—India’s ruling decriminalizing same-sex conduct last September stood out as a particularly significant precedent. Kenya’s penal code was essentially a copy-and-paste job by British colonizers who’d first imposed unnatural offenses laws on their erstwhile Indian subjects and then imported the Indian penal code to other parts of the British Empire.

The Kenyan activists seized on the India ruling, introducing it into evidence in their own constitutional challenge. “[H]omosexuality is a completely natural condition, part of a range of human sexuality,” the Indian Supreme Court found. Moreover, it said, “Our ability to survive as a free society will depend upon whether constitutional values can prevail over the impulses of the time,” such as “dogmatic social norms” and “bigoted perceptions.” Kenya’s courts have previously made use of international precedent on LGBT rights: In the 2015 ruling on the gay and lesbian commission’s registration, the court, in finding that sexual orientation cannot justify discrimination, cited the 1998 South African ruling that decriminalized same-sex conduct.

If Kenya’s ruling ultimately brings about decriminalization, its impact, as with India’s ruling, is likely to echo far beyond the country’s borders. Unfortunately, Kenya’s immediate neighbors may be among the least susceptible to progress. Uganda tried in 2014 to toughen its laws—which already included a life sentence for unnatural offenses—by passing into law the infamous Anti-Homosexuality Act, but savvy activists and human rights lawyers ensured its demise in the courts on technical grounds. They have won several court battles on LGBT-related issues but have lost others, including a case on freedom of association, and have not yet taken on decriminalization.

Tanzania drew global condemnation in October 2018, when a regional official pledged to round up all gay men in Dar es Salaam and subject them to forced anal exams. Conditions in Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan have been too hostile to LGBT rights or even human rights activism altogether to allow the conditions under which legal challenges to sodomy laws could have a chance of success. Just a stone’s throw farther west on the continent, Burundi (in 2009) and Chad (in 2017) are among the few countries to have adopted anti-homosexuality laws for the first time in the 21st century, demonstrating that progress is far from linear.

And while some regional institutions, notably the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, have become more receptive to LGBT equality, their evolution has come at high cost. The commission passed a resolution in 2014 condemning violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity and has criticized forced anal exams and restrictions on assembly for LGBT people, all attracting plaudits from human rights activists amid little or no public dissent. But when the commission granted observer status to the South Africa-based Coalition of African Lesbians in 2015, that seemed a step too far for the Executive Council of the African Union, whose assembly appoints commissioners but is supposed to allow them to operate independently, according to the African charter. Egypt, one of the most hostile countries to LGBT rights on the continent, led a charge to reverse the coalition’s observer status and is now actively seeking to claw away at the commission’s independence.

At least 69 countries maintain laws on their books that criminalize same-sex relations, 33 of them on the African continent, and 35 in the Commonwealth. Full equality for LGBT people around the globe still feels like a distant hope. Kenyan activists have struggled for years to bring that dream one step closer to reality. Friday’s postponement was a setback but not a defeat—hopes are still high for a strong, objective, and rights-respecting ruling in May.

Correction, Feb. 25, 2019: A previous version of this article said the African Union’s Executive Council appoints commissioners to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The commissioners are actually appointed by the African Union’s Assembly. The article has also been corrected to reflect that Egypt, not the AU as a whole, is challenging the commission’s independence.