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  • Beyond the Hype of Lab-Grown Diamonds
    https://earther.gizmodo.com/beyond-the-hype-of-lab-grown-diamonds-1834890351

    Billions of years ago when the world was still young, treasure began forming deep underground. As the edges of Earth’s tectonic plates plunged down into the upper mantle, bits of carbon, some likely hailing from long-dead life forms were melted and compressed into rigid lattices. Over millions of years, those lattices grew into the most durable, dazzling gems the planet had ever cooked up. And every so often, for reasons scientists still don’t fully understand, an eruption would send a stash of these stones rocketing to the surface inside a bubbly magma known as kimberlite.

    There, the diamonds would remain, nestled in the kimberlite volcanoes that delivered them from their fiery home, until humans evolved, learned of their existence, and began to dig them up.

    The epic origin of Earth’s diamonds has helped fuel a powerful marketing mythology around them: that they are objects of otherworldly strength and beauty; fitting symbols of eternal love. But while “diamonds are forever” may be the catchiest advertising slogan ever to bear some geologic truth, the supply of these stones in the Earth’s crust, in places we can readily reach them, is far from everlasting. And the scars we’ve inflicted on the land and ourselves in order to mine diamonds has cast a shadow that still lingers over the industry.

    Some diamond seekers, however, say we don’t need to scour the Earth any longer, because science now offers an alternative: diamonds grown in labs. These gems aren’t simulants or synthetic substitutes; they are optically, chemically, and physically identical to their Earth-mined counterparts. They’re also cheaper, and in theory, limitless. The arrival of lab-grown diamonds has rocked the jewelry world to its core and prompted fierce pushback from diamond miners. Claims abound on both sides.

    Growers often say that their diamonds are sustainable and ethical; miners and their industry allies counter that only gems plucked from the Earth can be considered “real” or “precious.” Some of these assertions are subjective, others are supported only by sparse, self-reported, or industry-backed data. But that’s not stopping everyone from making them.

    This is a fight over image, and when it comes to diamonds, image is everything.
    A variety of cut, polished Ada Diamonds created in a lab, including smaller melee stones and large center stones. 22.94 carats total. (2.60 ct. pear, 2.01 ct. asscher, 2.23 ct. cushion, 3.01 ct. radiant, 1.74 ct. princess, 2.11 ct. emerald, 3.11 ct. heart, 3.00 ct. oval, 3.13 ct. round.)
    Image: Sam Cannon (Earther)
    Same, but different

    The dream of lab-grown diamond dates back over a century. In 1911, science fiction author H.G. Wells described what would essentially become one of the key methods for making diamond—recreating the conditions inside Earth’s mantle on its surface—in his short story The Diamond Maker. As the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) notes, there were a handful of dubious attempts to create diamonds in labs in the late 19th and early 20th century, but the first commercial diamond production wouldn’t emerge until the mid-1950s, when scientists with General Electric worked out a method for creating small, brown stones. Others, including De Beers, soon developed their own methods for synthesizing the gems, and use of the lab-created diamond in industrial applications, from cutting tools to high power electronics, took off.

    According to the GIA’s James Shigley, the first experimental production of gem-quality diamond occurred in 1970. Yet by the early 2000s, gem-quality stones were still small, and often tinted yellow with impurities. It was only in the last five or so years that methods for growing diamonds advanced to the point that producers began churning out large, colorless stones consistently. That’s when the jewelry sector began to take a real interest.

    Today, that sector is taking off. The International Grown Diamond Association (IGDA), a trade group formed in 2016 by a dozen lab diamond growers and sellers, now has about 50 members, according to IGDA secretary general Dick Garard. When the IGDA first formed, lab-grown diamonds were estimated to represent about 1 percent of a $14 billion rough diamond market. This year, industry analyst Paul Zimnisky estimates they account for 2-3 percent of the market.

    He expects that share will only continue to grow as factories in China that already produce millions of carats a year for industrial purposes start to see an opportunity in jewelry.
    “I have a real problem with people claiming one is ethical and another is not.”

    “This year some [factories] will come up from 100,000 gem-quality diamonds to one to two million,” Zimnisky said. “They already have the infrastructure and equipment in place” and are in the process of upgrading it. (About 150 million carats of diamonds were mined last year, according to a global analysis of the industry conducted by Bain & Company.)

    Production ramp-up aside, 2018 saw some other major developments across the industry. In the summer, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reversed decades of guidance when it expanded the definition of a diamond to include those created in labs and dropped ‘synthetic’ as a recommended descriptor for lab-grown stones. The decision came on the heels of the world’s top diamond producer, De Beers, announcing the launch of its own lab-grown diamond line, Lightbox, after having once vowed never to sell man-made stones as jewelry.

    “I would say shock,” Lightbox Chief Marketing Officer Sally Morrison told Earther when asked how the jewelry world responded to the company’s launch.

    While the majority of lab-grown diamonds on the market today are what’s known as melee (less than 0.18 carats), the tech for producing the biggest, most dazzling diamonds continues to improve. In 2016, lab-grown diamond company MiaDonna announced its partners had grown a 6.28 carat gem-quality diamond, claimed to be the largest created in the U.S. to that point. In 2017, a lab in Augsburg University, Germany that grows diamonds for industrial and scientific research applications produced what is thought to be the largest lab-grown diamond ever—a 155 carat behemoth that stretches nearly 4 inches across. Not gem quality, perhaps, but still impressive.

    “If you compare it with the Queen’s diamond, hers is four times heavier, it’s clearer” physicist Matthias Schreck, who leads the group that grew that beast of a jewel, told me. “But in area, our diamond is bigger. We were very proud of this.”

    Diamonds can be created in one of two ways: Similar to how they form inside the Earth, or similar to how scientists speculate they might form in outer space.

    The older, Earth-inspired method is known as “high temperature high pressure” (HPHT), and that’s exactly what it sounds like. A carbon source, like graphite, is placed in a giant, mechanical press where, in the presence of a catalyst, it’s subjected to temperatures of around 1,600 degrees Celsius and pressures of 5-6 Gigapascals in order to form diamond. (If you’re curious what that sort of pressure feels like, the GIA describes it as similar to the force exerted if you tried to balance a commercial jet on your fingertip.)

    The newer method, called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), is more akin to how diamonds might form in interstellar gas clouds (for which we have indirect, spectroscopic evidence, according to Shigley). A hydrocarbon gas, like methane, is pumped into a low-pressure reactor vessel alongside hydrogen. While maintaining near-vacuum conditions, the gases are heated very hot—typically 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Celsius, according to Lightbox CEO Steve Coe—causing carbon atoms to break free of their molecular bonds. Under the right conditions, those liberated bits of carbon will settle out onto a substrate—typically a flat, square plate of a synthetic diamond produced with the HPHT method—forming layer upon layer of diamond.

    “It’s like snow falling on a table on your back porch,” Jason Payne, the founder and CEO of lab-grown diamond jewelry company Ada Diamonds, told me.

    Scientists have been forging gem-quality diamonds with HPHT for longer, but today, CVD has become the method of choice for those selling larger bridal stones. That’s in part because it’s easier to control impurities and make diamonds with very high clarity, according to Coe. Still, each method has its advantages—Payne said that HPHT is faster and the diamonds typically have better color (which is to say, less of it)—and some companies, like Ada, purchase stones grown in both ways.

    However they’re made, lab-grown diamonds have the same exceptional hardness, stiffness, and thermal conductivity as their Earth-mined counterparts. Cut, they can dazzle with the same brilliance and fire—a technical term to describe how well the diamond scatters light like a prism. The GIA even grades them according to the same 4Cs—cut, clarity, color, and carat—that gemologists use to assess diamonds formed in the Earth, although it uses a slightly different terminology to report the color and clarity grades for lab-grown stones.

    They’re so similar, in fact, that lab-grown diamond entering the larger diamond supply without any disclosures has become a major concern across the jewelry industry, particularly when it comes to melee stones from Asia. It’s something major retailers are now investing thousands of dollars in sophisticated detection equipment to suss out by searching for minute differences in, say, their crystal shape or for impurities like nitrogen (much less common in lab-grown diamond, according to Shigley).

    Those differences may be a lifeline for retailers hoping to weed out lab-grown diamonds, but for companies focused on them, they can become another selling point. The lack of nitrogen in diamonds produced with the CVD method, for instance, gives them an exceptional chemical purity that allows them to be classified as type IIa; a rare and coveted breed that accounts for just 2 percent of those found in nature. Meanwhile, the ability to control everything about the growth process allows companies like Lightbox to adjust the formula and produce incredibly rare blue and pink diamonds as part of their standard product line. (In fact, these colored gemstones have made up over half of the company’s sales since launch, according to Coe.)

    And while lab-grown diamonds boast the same sparkle as their Earthly counterparts, they do so at a significant discount. Zimnisky said that today, your typical one carat, medium quality diamond grown in a lab will sell for about $3,600, compared with $6,100 for its Earth-mined counterpart—a discount of about 40 percent. Two years ago, that discount was only 18 percent. And while the price drop has “slightly tapered off” as Zimnisky put it, he expects it will fall further thanks in part to the aforementioned ramp up in Chinese production, as well as technological improvements. (The market is also shifting in response to Lightbox, which De Beers is using to position lab-grown diamonds as mass produced items for fashion jewelry, and which is selling its stones, ungraded, at the controversial low price of $800 per carat—a discount of nearly 90 percent.)

    Zimnisky said that if the price falls too fast, it could devalue lab-grown diamonds in the eyes of consumers. But for now, at least, paying less seems to be a selling point. A 2018 consumer research survey by MVI Marketing found that most of those polled would choose a larger lab-grown diamond over a smaller mined diamond of the same price.

    “The thing [consumers] seem most compelled by is the ability to trade up in size and quality at the same price,” Garard of IGDA said.

    Still, for buyers and sellers alike, price is only part of the story. Many in the lab-grown diamond world market their product as an ethical or eco-friendly alternative to mined diamonds.

    But those sales pitches aren’t without controversy.
    A variety of lab-grown diamond products arrayed on a desk at Ada Diamonds showroom in Manhattan. The stone in the upper left gets its blue color from boron. Diamonds tinted yellow (top center) usually get their color from small amounts of nitrogen.
    Photo: Sam Cannon (Earther)
    Dazzling promises

    As Anna-Mieke Anderson tells it, she didn’t enter the diamond world to become a corporate tycoon. She did it to try and fix a mistake.

    In 1999, Anderson purchased herself a diamond. Some years later, in 2005, her father asked her where it came from. Nonplussed, she told him it came from the jewelry store. But that wasn’t what he was asking: He wanted to know where it really came from.

    “I actually had no idea,” Anderson told Earther. “That led me to do a mountain of research.”

    That research eventually led Anderson to conclude that she had likely bought a diamond mined under horrific conditions. She couldn’t be sure, because the certificate of purchase included no place of origin. But around the time of her purchase, civil wars funded by diamond mining were raging across Angola, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia, fueling “widespread devastation” as Global Witness put it in 2006. At the height of the diamond wars in the late ‘90s, the watchdog group estimates that as many as 15 percent of diamonds entering the market were conflict diamonds. Even those that weren’t actively fueling a war were often being mined in dirty, hazardous conditions; sometimes by children.

    “I couldn’t believe I’d bought into this,” Anderson said.

    To try and set things right, Anderson began sponsoring a boy living in a Liberian community impacted by the blood diamond trade. The experience was so eye-opening, she says, that she eventually felt compelled to sponsor more children. Selling conflict-free jewelry seemed like a fitting way to raise money to do so, but after a great deal more research, Anderson decided she couldn’t in good faith consider any diamond pulled from the Earth to be truly conflict-free in either the humanitarian or environmental sense. While diamond miners were, by the early 2000s, getting their gems certified “conflict free” according to the UN-backed Kimberley Process, the certification scheme’s definition of a conflict diamond—one sold by rebel groups to finance armed conflicts against governments—felt far too narrow.

    “That [conflict definition] eliminates anything to do with the environment, or eliminates a child mining it, or someone who was a slave, or beaten, or raped,” Anderson said.

    And so she started looking into science, and in 2007, launching MiaDonna as one of the world’s first lab-grown diamond jewelry companies. The business has been activism-oriented from the get-go, with at least five percent of its annual earnings—and more than 20 percent for the last three years—going into The Greener Diamond, Anderson’s charity foundation which has funded a wide range of projects, from training former child soldiers in Sierra Leone to grow food to sponsoring kids orphaned by the West African Ebola outbreak.

    MiaDonna isn’t the only company that positions itself as an ethical alternative to the traditional diamond industry. Brilliant Earth, which sells what it says are carefully-sourced mined and lab-created diamonds, also donates a small portion of its profits to supporting mining communities. Other lab-grown diamond companies market themselves as “ethical,” “conflict-free,” or “world positive.” Payne of Ada Diamonds sees, in lab-grown diamonds, not just shiny baubles, but a potential to improve medicine, clean up pollution, and advance society in countless other ways—and he thinks the growing interest in lab-grown diamond jewelry will help propel us toward that future.

    Others, however, say black-and-white characterizations when it comes to social impact of mined diamonds versus lab-grown stones are unfair. “I have a real problem with people claiming one is ethical and another is not,” Estelle Levin-Nally, founder and CEO of Levin Sources, which advocates for better governance in the mining sector, told Earther. “I think it’s always about your politics. And ethics are subjective.”

    Saleem Ali, an environmental researcher at the University of Delaware who serves on the board of the Diamonds and Development Initiative, agrees. He says the mining industry has, on the whole, worked hard to turn itself around since the height of the diamond wars and that governance is “much better today” than it used to be. Human rights watchdog Global Witness also says that “significant progress” has been made to curb the conflict diamond trade, although as Alice Harle, Senior Campaigner with Global Witness told Earther via email, diamonds do still fuel conflict, particularly in the Central African Republic and Zimbabwe.

    Most industry observers seems to agree that the Kimberley Process is outdated and inadequate, and that more work is needed to stamp out other abuses, including child labor and forced labor, in the artisanal and small-scale diamond mining sector. Today, large-scale mining operations don’t tend to see these kinds of problems, according to Julianne Kippenberg, associate director for children’s rights at Human Rights Watch, but she notes that there may be other community impacts surrounding land rights and forced resettlement.

    The flip side, Ali and Levin-Nally say, is that well-regulated mining operations can be an important source of economic development and livelihood. Ali cites Botswana and Russia as prime examples of places where large-scale mining operations have become “major contributors to the economy.” Dmitry Amelkin, head of strategic projects and analytics for Russian diamond mining giant Alrosa, echoed that sentiment in an email to Earther, noting that diamonds transformed Botswana “from one of the poorest [countries] in the world to a middle-income country” with revenues from mining representing almost a third of its GDP.

    In May, a report commissioned by the Diamond Producers Association (DPA), a trade organization representing the world’s largest diamond mining companies, estimated that worldwide, its members generate nearly $4 billion in direct revenue for employees and contractors, along with another $6.8 billion in benefits via “local procurement of goods and services.” DPA CEO Jean-Marc Lieberherr said this was a story diamond miners need to do a better job telling.

    “The industry has undergone such changes since the Blood Diamond movie,” he said, referring to the blockbuster 2006 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio that drew global attention to the problem of conflict diamonds. “And yet people’s’ perceptions haven’t evolved. I think the main reason is we have not had a voice, we haven’t communicated.”

    But conflict and human rights abuses aren’t the only issues that have plagued the diamond industry. There’s also the lasting environmental impact of the mining itself. In the case of large-scale commercial mines, this typically entails using heavy machinery and explosives to bore deep into those kimberlite tubes in search of precious stones.

    Some, like Maya Koplyova, a geologist at the University of British Columbia who studies diamonds and the rocks they’re found in, see this as far better than many other forms of mining. “The environmental footprint is the fThere’s also the question of just how representative the report’s energy consumption estimates for lab-grown diamonds are. While he wouldn’t offer a specific number, Coe said that De Beers’ Group diamond manufacturer Element Six—arguably the most advanced laboratory-grown diamond company in the world—has “substantially lower” per carat energy requirements than the headline figures found inside the new report. When asked why this was not included, Rick Lord, ESG analyst at Trucost, the S&P global group that conducted the analysis, said it chose to focus on energy estimates in the public record, but that after private consultation with Element Six it did not believe their data would “materially alter” the emissions estimates in the study.

    Finally, it’s important to consider the source of the carbon emissions. While the new report states that about 40 percent of the emissions associated with mining a diamond come from fossil fuel-powered vehicles and equipment, emissions associated with growing a diamond come mainly from electric power. Today, about 68 percent of lab-grown diamonds hail from China, Singapore, and India combined according to Zimnisky, where the power is drawn from largely fossil fuel-powered grids. But there is, at least, an opportunity to switch to renewables and drive that carbon footprint way down.
    “The reality is both mining and manufacturing consume energy and probably the best thing we could do is focus on reducing energy consumption.”

    And some companies do seem to be trying to do that. Anderson of MiaDonna says the company only sources its diamonds from facilities in the U.S., and that it’s increasingly trying to work with producers that use renewable energy. Lab-grown diamond company Diamond Foundry grows its stones inside plasma reactors running “as hot as the outer layer of the sun,” per its website, and while it wouldn’t offer any specific numbers, that presumably uses more energy than your typical operation running at lower temperatures. However, company spokesperson Ye-Hui Goldenson said its Washington State ‘megacarat factory’ was cited near a well-maintained hydropower source so that the diamonds could be produced with renewable energy. The company offsets other fossil fuel-driven parts of its operation by purchasing carbon credits.

    Lightbox’s diamonds currently come from Element Six’s UK-based facilities. The company is, however, building a $94-million facility near Portland, Oregon, that’s expected to come online by 2020. Coe said he estimates about 45 percent of its power will come from renewable sources.

    “The reality is both mining and manufacturing consume energy and probably the best thing we could do is focus on reducing energy consumption,” Coe said. “That’s something we’re focused on in Lightbox.”

    In spite of that, Lightbox is somewhat notable among lab-grown diamond jewelry brands in that, in the words of Morrison, it is “not claiming this to be an eco-friendly product.”

    “While it is true that we don’t dig holes in the ground, the energy consumption is not insignificant,” Morrison told Earther. “And I think we felt very uncomfortable promoting on that.”
    Various diamonds created in a lab, as seen at the Ada Diamonds showroom in Manhattan.
    Photo: Sam Cannon (Earther)
    The real real

    The fight over how lab-grown diamonds can and should market themselves is still heating up.

    On March 26, the FTC sent letters to eight lab-grown and diamond simulant companies warning them against making unsubstantiated assertions about the environmental benefits of their products—its first real enforcement action after updating its jewelry guides last year. The letters, first obtained by JCK news director Rob Bates under a Freedom of Information Act request, also warned companies that their advertising could falsely imply the products are mined diamonds, illustrating that, even though the agency now says a lab-grown diamond is a diamond, the specific origin remains critically important. A letter to Diamond Foundry, for instance, notes that the company has at times advertised its stones as “above-ground real” without the qualification of “laboratory-made.” It’s easy to see how a consumer might miss the implication.

    But in a sense, that’s what all of this is: A fight over what’s real.
    “It’s a nuanced reality that we’re in. They are a type of diamond.”

    Another letter, sent to FTC attorney Reenah Kim by the nonprofit trade organization Jewelers Vigilance Committee on April 2, makes it clear that many in the industry still believe that’s a term that should be reserved exclusively for gems formed inside the Earth. The letter, obtained by Earther under FOIA, urges the agency to continue restricting the use of the terms “real,” “genuine,” “natural,” “precious,” and “semi-precious” to Earth-mined diamonds and gemstones. Even the use of such terms in conjunction with “laboratory grown,” the letter argues, “will create even more confusion in an already confused and evolving marketplace.”

    JVC President Tiffany Stevens told Earther that the letter was a response to a footnote in an explanatory document about the FTC’s recent jewelry guide changes, which suggested the agency was considering removing a clause about real, precious, natural and genuine only being acceptable modifiers for gems mined from the Earth.

    “We felt that given the current commercial environment, that we didn’t think it was a good time to take that next step,” Stevens told Earther. As Stevens put it, the changes the FTC recently made, including expanding the definition of diamond and tweaking the descriptors companies can use to label laboratory-grown diamonds as such, have already been “wildly misinterpreted” by some lab-grown diamond sellers that are no longer making the “necessary disclosures.”

    Asked whether the JVC thinks lab-grown diamonds are, in fact, real diamonds, Stevens demurred.

    “It’s a nuanced reality that we’re in,” she said. “They are a type of diamond.”

    Change is afoot in the diamond world. Mined diamond production may have already peaked, according to the 2018 Bain & Company report. Lab diamonds are here to stay, although where they’re going isn’t entirely clear. Zimnisky expects that in a few years—as Lightbox’s new facility comes online and mass production of lab diamonds continues to ramp up overseas—the price industry-wide will fall to about 80 percent less than a mined diamond. At that point, he wonders whether lab-grown diamonds will start to lose their sparkle.

    Payne isn’t too worried about a price slide, which he says is happening across the diamond industry and which he expects will be “linear, not exponential” on the lab-grown side. He points out that lab-grown diamond market is still limited by supply, and that the largest lab-grown gems remain quite rare. Payne and Zimnisky both see the lab-grown diamond market bifurcating into cheaper, mass-produced gems and premium-quality stones sold by those that can maintain a strong brand. A sense that they’re selling something authentic and, well, real.

    “So much has to do with consumer psychology,” Zimnisky said.

    Some will only ever see diamonds as authentic if they formed inside the Earth. They’re drawn, as Kathryn Money, vice president of strategy and merchandising at Brilliant Earth put it, to “the history and romanticism” of diamonds; to a feeling that’s sparked by holding a piece of our ancient world. To an essence more than a function.

    Others, like Anderson, see lab-grown diamonds as the natural (to use a loaded word) evolution of diamond. “We’re actually running out of [mined] diamonds,” she said. “There is an end in sight.” Payne agreed, describing what he sees as a “looming death spiral” for diamond mining.

    Mined diamonds will never go away. We’ve been digging them up since antiquity, and they never seem to lose their sparkle. But most major mines are being exhausted. And with technology making it easier to grow diamonds just as they are getting more difficult to extract from the Earth, the lab-grown diamond industry’s grandstanding about its future doesn’t feel entirely unreasonable.

    There’s a reason why, as Payne said, “the mining industry as a whole is still quite scared of this product.” ootprint of digging the hole in the ground and crushing [the rock],” Koplyova said, noting that there’s no need to add strong acids or heavy metals like arsenic (used in gold mining) to liberate the gems.

    Still, those holes can be enormous. The Mir Mine, a now-abandoned open pit mine in Eastern Siberia, is so large—reportedly stretching 3,900 feet across and 1,700 feet deep—that the Russian government has declared it a no-fly zone owing to the pit’s ability to create dangerous air currents. It’s visible from space.

    While companies will often rehabilitate other land to offset the impact of mines, kimberlite mining itself typically leaves “a permanent dent in the earth’s surface,” as a 2014 report by market research company Frost & Sullivan put it.

    “It’s a huge impact as far as I’m concerned,” said Kevin Krajick, senior editor for science news at Columbia University’s Earth Institute who wrote a book on the discovery of diamonds in far northern Canada. Krajick noted that in remote mines, like those of the far north, it’s not just the physical hole to consider, but all the development required to reach a previously-untouched area, including roads and airstrips, roaring jets and diesel-powered trucks.

    Diamonds grown in factories clearly have a smaller physical footprint. According to the Frost & Sullivan report, they also use less water and create less waste. It’s for these reasons that Ali thinks diamond mining “will never be able to compete” with lab-grown diamonds from an environmental perspective.

    “The mining industry should not even by trying to do that,” he said.

    Of course, this is capitalism, so try to compete is exactly what the DPA is now doing. That same recent report that touted the mining industry’s economic benefits also asserts that mined diamonds have a carbon footprint three times lower than that of lab-grown diamonds, on average. The numbers behind that conclusion, however, don’t tell the full story.

    Growing diamonds does take considerable energy. The exact amount can vary greatly, however, depending on the specific nature of the growth process. These are details manufacturers are typically loathe to disclose, but Payne of Ada Diamonds says he estimates the most efficient players in the game today use about 250 kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity per cut, polished carat of diamond; roughly what a U.S. household consumes in 9 days. Other estimates run higher. Citing unnamed sources, industry publication JCK Online reported that a modern HPHT run can use up to 700 kWh per carat, while CVD production can clock in north of 1,000 kWh per carat.

    Pulling these and several other public-record estimates, along with information on where in the world today’s lab diamonds are being grown and the energy mix powering the producer nations’ electric grids, the DPA-commissioned study estimated that your typical lab-grown diamond results in some 511 kg of carbon emissions per cut, polished carat. Using information provided by mining companies on fuel and electricity consumption, along with other greenhouse gas sources on the mine site, it found that the average mined carat was responsible for just 160 kg of carbon emissions.

    One limitation here is that the carbon footprint estimate for mining focused only on diamond production, not the years of work entailed in developing a mine. As Ali noted, developing a mine can take a lot of energy, particularly for those sited in remote locales where equipment needs to be hauled long distances by trucks or aircraft.

    There’s also the question of just how representative the report’s energy consumption estimates for lab-grown diamonds are. While he wouldn’t offer a specific number, Coe said that De Beers’ Group diamond manufacturer Element Six—arguably the most advanced laboratory-grown diamond company in the world—has “substantially lower” per carat energy requirements than the headline figures found inside the new report. When asked why this was not included, Rick Lord, ESG analyst at Trucost, the S&P global group that conducted the analysis, said it chose to focus on energy estimates in the public record, but that after private consultation with Element Six it did not believe their data would “materially alter” the emissions estimates in the study.

    Finally, it’s important to consider the source of the carbon emissions. While the new report states that about 40 percent of the emissions associated with mining a diamond come from fossil fuel-powered vehicles and equipment, emissions associated with growing a diamond come mainly from electric power. Today, about 68 percent of lab-grown diamonds hail from China, Singapore, and India combined according to Zimnisky, where the power is drawn from largely fossil fuel-powered grids. But there is, at least, an opportunity to switch to renewables and drive that carbon footprint way down.
    “The reality is both mining and manufacturing consume energy and probably the best thing we could do is focus on reducing energy consumption.”

    And some companies do seem to be trying to do that. Anderson of MiaDonna says the company only sources its diamonds from facilities in the U.S., and that it’s increasingly trying to work with producers that use renewable energy. Lab-grown diamond company Diamond Foundry grows its stones inside plasma reactors running “as hot as the outer layer of the sun,” per its website, and while it wouldn’t offer any specific numbers, that presumably uses more energy than your typical operation running at lower temperatures. However, company spokesperson Ye-Hui Goldenson said its Washington State ‘megacarat factory’ was cited near a well-maintained hydropower source so that the diamonds could be produced with renewable energy. The company offsets other fossil fuel-driven parts of its operation by purchasing carbon credits.

    Lightbox’s diamonds currently come from Element Six’s UK-based facilities. The company is, however, building a $94-million facility near Portland, Oregon, that’s expected to come online by 2020. Coe said he estimates about 45 percent of its power will come from renewable sources.

    “The reality is both mining and manufacturing consume energy and probably the best thing we could do is focus on reducing energy consumption,” Coe said. “That’s something we’re focused on in Lightbox.”

    In spite of that, Lightbox is somewhat notable among lab-grown diamond jewelry brands in that, in the words of Morrison, it is “not claiming this to be an eco-friendly product.”

    “While it is true that we don’t dig holes in the ground, the energy consumption is not insignificant,” Morrison told Earther. “And I think we felt very uncomfortable promoting on that.”
    Various diamonds created in a lab, as seen at the Ada Diamonds showroom in Manhattan.
    Photo: Sam Cannon (Earther)
    The real real

    The fight over how lab-grown diamonds can and should market themselves is still heating up.

    On March 26, the FTC sent letters to eight lab-grown and diamond simulant companies warning them against making unsubstantiated assertions about the environmental benefits of their products—its first real enforcement action after updating its jewelry guides last year. The letters, first obtained by JCK news director Rob Bates under a Freedom of Information Act request, also warned companies that their advertising could falsely imply the products are mined diamonds, illustrating that, even though the agency now says a lab-grown diamond is a diamond, the specific origin remains critically important. A letter to Diamond Foundry, for instance, notes that the company has at times advertised its stones as “above-ground real” without the qualification of “laboratory-made.” It’s easy to see how a consumer might miss the implication.

    But in a sense, that’s what all of this is: A fight over what’s real.
    “It’s a nuanced reality that we’re in. They are a type of diamond.”

    Another letter, sent to FTC attorney Reenah Kim by the nonprofit trade organization Jewelers Vigilance Committee on April 2, makes it clear that many in the industry still believe that’s a term that should be reserved exclusively for gems formed inside the Earth. The letter, obtained by Earther under FOIA, urges the agency to continue restricting the use of the terms “real,” “genuine,” “natural,” “precious,” and “semi-precious” to Earth-mined diamonds and gemstones. Even the use of such terms in conjunction with “laboratory grown,” the letter argues, “will create even more confusion in an already confused and evolving marketplace.”

    JVC President Tiffany Stevens told Earther that the letter was a response to a footnote in an explanatory document about the FTC’s recent jewelry guide changes, which suggested the agency was considering removing a clause about real, precious, natural and genuine only being acceptable modifiers for gems mined from the Earth.

    “We felt that given the current commercial environment, that we didn’t think it was a good time to take that next step,” Stevens told Earther. As Stevens put it, the changes the FTC recently made, including expanding the definition of diamond and tweaking the descriptors companies can use to label laboratory-grown diamonds as such, have already been “wildly misinterpreted” by some lab-grown diamond sellers that are no longer making the “necessary disclosures.”

    Asked whether the JVC thinks lab-grown diamonds are, in fact, real diamonds, Stevens demurred.

    “It’s a nuanced reality that we’re in,” she said. “They are a type of diamond.”

    Change is afoot in the diamond world. Mined diamond production may have already peaked, according to the 2018 Bain & Company report. Lab diamonds are here to stay, although where they’re going isn’t entirely clear. Zimnisky expects that in a few years—as Lightbox’s new facility comes online and mass production of lab diamonds continues to ramp up overseas—the price industry-wide will fall to about 80 percent less than a mined diamond. At that point, he wonders whether lab-grown diamonds will start to lose their sparkle.

    Payne isn’t too worried about a price slide, which he says is happening across the diamond industry and which he expects will be “linear, not exponential” on the lab-grown side. He points out that lab-grown diamond market is still limited by supply, and that the largest lab-grown gems remain quite rare. Payne and Zimnisky both see the lab-grown diamond market bifurcating into cheaper, mass-produced gems and premium-quality stones sold by those that can maintain a strong brand. A sense that they’re selling something authentic and, well, real.

    “So much has to do with consumer psychology,” Zimnisky said.

    Some will only ever see diamonds as authentic if they formed inside the Earth. They’re drawn, as Kathryn Money, vice president of strategy and merchandising at Brilliant Earth put it, to “the history and romanticism” of diamonds; to a feeling that’s sparked by holding a piece of our ancient world. To an essence more than a function.

    Others, like Anderson, see lab-grown diamonds as the natural (to use a loaded word) evolution of diamond. “We’re actually running out of [mined] diamonds,” she said. “There is an end in sight.” Payne agreed, describing what he sees as a “looming death spiral” for diamond mining.

    Mined diamonds will never go away. We’ve been digging them up since antiquity, and they never seem to lose their sparkle. But most major mines are being exhausted. And with technology making it easier to grow diamonds just as they are getting more difficult to extract from the Earth, the lab-grown diamond industry’s grandstanding about its future doesn’t feel entirely unreasonable.

    There’s a reason why, as Payne said, “the mining industry as a whole is still quite scared of this product.”

    #dimants #Afrique #technologie #capitalisme

  • Dix candidats pour succéder à May, un point commun : mieux vaut le Brexit que Corbyn
    https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/06/11/dix-candidats-pour-succeder-a-may-un-point-commun-mieux-vaut-le-brexit-que-c

    Selon Jeremy Hunt, l’un des trois favoris au poste de premier ministre, le travailliste Jeremy Corbyn est « le leader le plus à gauche et le plus dangereux ».

    Finalement, le Brexit est compatible avec le système.

  • Call immigrant detention centers what they really are: concentration camps

    If you were paying close attention last week, you might have spotted a pattern in the news. Peeking out from behind the breathless coverage of the Trump family’s tuxedoed trip to London was a spate of deaths of immigrants in U.S. custody: Johana Medina Léon, a 25-year-old transgender asylum seeker; an unnamed 33-year-old Salvadoran man; and a 40-year-old woman from Honduras.

    Photos from a Border Patrol processing center in El Paso showed people herded so tightly into cells that they had to stand on toilets to breathe. Memos surfaced by journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s failure to provide medical care was responsible for suicides and other deaths of detainees. These followed another report that showed that thousands of detainees are being brutally held in isolation cells just for being transgender or mentally ill.

    Also last week, the Trump administration cut funding for classes, recreation and legal aid at detention centers holding minors — which were likened to “summer camps” by a senior ICE official last year. And there was the revelation that months after being torn from their parents’ arms, 37 children were locked in vans for up to 39 hours in the parking lot of a detention center outside Port Isabel, Texas. In the last year, at least seven migrant children have died in federal custody.

    Preventing mass outrage at a system like this takes work. Certainly it helps that the news media covers these horrors intermittently rather than as snowballing proof of a racist, lawless administration. But most of all, authorities prevail when the places where people are being tortured and left to die stay hidden, misleadingly named and far from prying eyes.

    There’s a name for that kind of system. They’re called concentration camps. You might balk at my use of the term. That’s good — it’s something to be balked at.

    The goal of concentration camps has always been to be ignored. The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, who was imprisoned by the Gestapo and interned in a French camp, wrote a few years afterward about the different levels of concentration camps. Extermination camps were the most extreme; others were just about getting “undesirable elements … out of the way.” All had one thing in common: “The human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.”

    Euphemisms play a big role in that forgetting. The term “concentration camp” is itself a euphemism. It was invented by a Spanish official to paper over his relocation of millions of rural families into squalid garrison towns where they would starve during Cuba’s 1895 independence war. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans into prisons during World War II, he initially called them concentration camps. Americans ended up using more benign names, like “Manzanar Relocation Center.”

    Even the Nazis’ camps started out small, housing criminals, Communists and opponents of the regime. It took five years to begin the mass detention of Jews. It took eight, and the outbreak of a world war, for the first extermination camps to open. Even then, the Nazis had to keep lying to distract attention, claiming Jews were merely being resettled to remote work sites. That’s what the famous signs — Arbeit Macht Frei, or “Work Sets You Free” — were about.

    Subterfuge doesn’t always work. A year ago, Americans accidentally became aware that the Trump administration had adopted (and lied about) a policy of ripping families apart at the border. The flurry of attention was thanks to the viral conflation of two separate but related stories: the family-separation order and bureaucrats’ admission that they’d been unable to locate thousands of migrant children who’d been placed with sponsors after crossing the border alone.

    Trump shoved that easily down the memory hole. He dragged his heels a bit, then agreed to a new policy: throwing whole families into camps together. Political reporters posed irrelevant questions, like whether President Obama had been just as bad, and what it meant for the midterms. Then they moved on.

    It is important to note that Trump’s aides have built this system of racist terror on something that has existed for a long time. Several camps opened under Obama, and as president he deported millions of people.

    But Trump’s game is different. It certainly isn’t about negotiating immigration reform with Congress. Trump has made it clear that he wants to stifle all non-white immigration, period. His mass arrests, iceboxes and dog cages are part of an explicitly nationalist project to put the country under the control of the right kind of white people.

    As a Republican National Committee report noted in 2013: “The nation’s demographic changes add to the urgency of recognizing how precarious our position has become.” The Trump administration’s attempt to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census was also just revealed to have been a plot to disadvantage political opponents and boost “Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” all along.

    That’s why this isn’t just a crisis facing immigrants. When a leader puts people in camps to stay in power, history shows that he doesn’t usually stop with the first group he detains.

    There are now at least 48,000 people detained in ICE facilities, which a former official told BuzzFeed News “could swell indefinitely.” Customs and Border Protection officials apprehended more than 144,000 people on the Southwest border last month. (The New York Times dutifully reported this as evidence of a “dramatic surge in border crossings,” rather than what it was: The administration using its own surge of arrests to justify the rest of its policies.)

    If we call them what they are — a growing system of American concentration camps — we will be more likely to give them the attention they deserve. We need to know their names: Port Isabel, Dilley, Adelanto, Hutto and on and on. With constant, unrelenting attention, it is possible we might alleviate the plight of the people inside, and stop the crisis from getting worse. Maybe people won’t be able to disappear so easily into the iceboxes. Maybe it will be harder for authorities to lie about children’s deaths.

    Maybe Trump’s concentration camps will be the first thing we think of when we see him scowling on TV.

    The only other option is to leave it up to those in power to decide what’s next. That’s a calculated risk. As Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night,” one of the most comprehensive books on the history of concentration camps, recently noted: “Every country has said their camps are humane and will be different. Trump is instinctively an authoritarian. He’ll take them as far as he’s allowed to.”

    https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-katz-immigrant-concentration-camps-20190609-story.html
    #terminologie #vocabulaire #mots #camps #camps_de_concentration #centres_de_détention #détention_administrative #rétention #USA #Etats-Unis
    #cpa_camps

    • ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System

      On Monday, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to US border detention facilities as “concentration camps,” spurring a backlash in which critics accused her of demeaning the memory of those who died in the Holocaust. Debates raged over a label for what is happening along the southern border and grew louder as the week rolled on. But even this back-and-forth over naming the camps has been a recurrent feature in the mass detention of civilians ever since its inception, a history that long predates the Holocaust.

      At the heart of such policy is a question: What does a country owe desperate people whom it does not consider to be its citizens? The twentieth century posed this question to the world just as the shadow of global conflict threatened for the second time in less than three decades. The dominant response was silence, and the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty meant that what a state did to people under its control, within its borders, was nobody else’s business. After the harrowing toll of the Holocaust with the murder of millions, the world revisited its answer, deciding that perhaps something was owed to those in mortal danger. From the Fourth Geneva Convention protecting civilians in 1949 to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the international community established humanitarian obligations toward the most vulnerable that apply, at least in theory, to all nations.

      The twenty-first century is unraveling that response. Countries are rejecting existing obligations and meeting asylum seekers with walls and fences, from detainees fleeing persecution who were sent by Australia to third-party detention in the brutal offshore camps of Manus and Nauru to razor-wire barriers blocking Syrian refugees from entering Hungary. While some nations, such as Germany, wrestle with how to integrate refugees into their labor force—more and more have become resistant to letting them in at all. The latest location of this unwinding is along the southern border of the United States.

      So far, American citizens have gotten only glimpses of the conditions in the border camps that have been opened in their name. In the month of May, Customs and Border Protection reported a total of 132,887 migrants who were apprehended or turned themselves in between ports of entry along the southwest border, an increase of 34 percent from April alone. Upon apprehension, these migrants are temporarily detained by Border Patrol, and once their claims are processed, they are either released or handed over to ICE for longer-term detention. Yet Border Patrol itself is currently holding about 15,000 people, nearly four times what government officials consider to be this enforcement arm’s detention capacity.

      On June 12, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that Fort Sill, an Army post that hosted a World War II internment camp for detainees of Japanese descent, will now be repurposed to detain migrant children. In total, HHS reports that it is currently holding some 12,000 minors. Current law limits detention of minors to twenty days, though Senator Lindsey Graham has proposed expanding the court-ordered limit to 100 days. Since the post is on federal land, it will be exempt from state child welfare inspections.

      In addition to the total of detainees held by Border Patrol, an even higher number is detained at centers around the country by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency: on a typical day at the beginning of this month, ICE was detaining more than 52,500 migrants. The family separation policy outraged the public in the 2018, but despite legal challenges, it never fully ended. Less publicized have been the deaths of twenty-four adults in ICE custody since the beginning of the Trump administration; in addition, six children between the ages of two and sixteen have died in federal custody over the last several months. It’s not clear whether there have been other deaths that have gone unreported.

      Conditions for detainees have not been improving. At the end of May, a Department of Homeland Security inspector general found nearly 900 migrants at a Texas shelter built for a capacity of 125 people. On June 11, a university professor spotted at least 100 men behind chain-link fences near the Paso del Norte Bridge in El Paso, Texas. Those detainees reported sitting outside for weeks in temperatures that soared above 100 degrees. Taylor Levy, an El Paso immigration lawyer, described going into one facility and finding “a suicidal four-year-old whose face was covered in bloody, self-inflicted scratches… Another young child had to be restrained by his mother because he kept running full-speed into metal lockers. He was covered in bruises.”

      If deciding what to do about the growing numbers of adults and children seeking refuge in the US relies on complex humanitarian policies and international laws, in which most Americans don’t take a deep interest, a simpler question also presents itself: What exactly are these camps that the Trump administration has opened, and where is this program of mass detention headed?

      Even with incomplete information about what’s happening along the border today and what the government plans for these camps, history points to some conclusions about their future. Mass detention without trial earned a new name and a specific identity at the end of the nineteenth century. The labels then adopted for the practice were “reconcentración” and “concentration camps”—places of forced relocation of civilians into detention on the basis of group identity.

      Other kinds of group detention had appeared much earlier in North American history. The US government drove Native Americans from their homelands into prescribed exile, with death and detention in transit camps along the way. Some Spanish mission systems in the Americas had accomplished similar ends by seizing land and pressing indigenous people into forced labor. During the 245 years when slavery was legal in the US, detention was one of its essential features.

      Concentration camps, however, don’t typically result from the theft of land, as happened with Native Americans, or owning human beings in a system of forced labor, as in the slave trade. Exile, theft, and forced labor can come later, but in the beginning, detention itself is usually the point of concentration camps. By the end of the nineteenth century, the mass production of barbed wire and machines guns made this kind of detention possible and practical in ways it never had been before.

      Under Spanish rule in 1896, the governor-general of Cuba instituted camps in order to clear rebel-held regions during an uprising, despite his predecessor’s written refusal “as the representative of a civilized nation, to be the first to give the example of cruelty and intransigence” that such detention would represent. After women and children began dying in vast numbers behind barbed wire because there had been little planning for shelter and even less for food, US President William McKinley made his call to war before Congress. He spoke against the policy of reconcentración, calling it warfare by uncivilized means. “It was extermination,” McKinley said. “The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.” Without full records, the Cuban death toll can only be estimated, but a consensus puts it in the neighborhood of 150,000, more than 10 percent of the island’s prewar population.

      Today, we remember the sinking of the USS Maine as the spark that ignited the Spanish-American War. But war correspondent George Kennan (cousin of the more famous diplomat) believed that “it was the suffering of the reconcentrados, more, perhaps, than any other one thing that brought about the intervention of the United States.” On April 25, 1898, Congress declared war. Two weeks later, US Marines landed at Fisherman’s Point on the windward side of the entrance to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. After a grim, week-long fight, the Marines took the hill. It became a naval base, and the United States has never left that patch of land.

      As part of the larger victory, the US inherited the Philippines. The world’s newest imperial power also inherited a rebellion. Following a massacre of American troops at Balangiga in September 1901, during the third year of the conflict, the US established its own concentration camp system. Detainees, mostly women and children, were forced into squalid conditions that one American soldier described in a letter to a US senator as “some suburb of hell.” In the space of only four months, more than 11,000 Filipinos are believed to have died in these noxious camps.

      Meanwhile, in southern Africa in 1900, the British had opened their own camps during their battle with descendants of Dutch settlers in the second Boer War. British soldiers filled tent cities with Boer women and children, and the military authorities called them refugee camps. Future Prime Minister David Lloyd George took offense at that name, noting in Parliament: “There is no greater delusion in the mind of any man than to apply the term ‘refugee’ to these camps. They are not refugee camps. They are camps of concentration.” Contemporary observers compared them to the Cuban camps, and criticized their deliberate cruelty. The Bishop of Hereford wrote to The Times of London in 1901, asking: “Are we reduced to such a depth of impotence that our Government can do nothing to stop such a holocaust of child-life?”

      Maggoty meat rations and polluted water supplies joined outbreaks of contagious diseases amid crowded and unhealthy conditions in the Boer camps. More than 27,000 detainees are thought to have died there, nearly 80 percent of them children. The British had opened camps for black Africans as well, in which at least 14,000 detainees died—the real number is probably much higher. Aside from protests made by some missionaries, the deaths of indigenous black Africans did not inspire much public outrage. Much of the history of the suffering in these camps has been lost.

      These early experiments with concentration camps took place on the periphery of imperial power, but accounts of them nevertheless made their way into newspapers and reports in many nations. As a result, the very idea of them came to be seen as barbaric. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the first camp systems had all been closed, and concentration camps had nearly vanished as an institution. Within months of the outbreak of World War I, though, they would be resurrected—this time rising not at the margins but in the centers of power. Between 1914 and 1918, camps were constructed on an unprecedented scale across six continents. In their time, these camps were commonly called concentration camps, though today they are often referred to by the more anodyne term “internment.”

      Those World War I detainees were, for the most part, foreigners—or, in legalese, aliens—and recent anti-immigration legislation in several countries had deliberately limited their rights. The Daily Mail denounced aliens left at liberty once they had registered with their local police department, demanding, “Does signing his name take the malice out of a man?” The Scottish Field was more direct, asking, “Do Germans have souls?” That these civilian detainees were no threat to Britain did not keep them from being demonized, shouted at, and spat upon as they were paraded past hostile crowds in cities like London.

      Though a small number of people were shot in riots in these camps, and hunger became a serious issue as the conflict dragged on, World War I internment would present a new, non-lethal face for the camps, normalizing detention. Even after the war, new camps sprang up from Spain to Hungary and Cuba, providing an improvised “solution” for everything from vagrancy to anxieties over the presence of Jewish foreigners.

      Some of these camps were clearly not safe for those interned. Local camps appeared in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, after a white mob burned down a black neighborhood and detained African-American survivors. In Bolshevik Russia, the first concentration camps preceded the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922 and planted seeds for the brutal Gulag system that became official near the end of the USSR’s first decade. While some kinds of camps were understood to be harsher, after World War I their proliferation did not initially disturb public opinion. They had yet to take on their worst incarnations.

      In 1933, barely more than a month after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Nazis’ first, impromptu camp opened in the town of Nohra in central Germany to hold political opponents. Detainees at Nohra were allowed to vote at a local precinct in the elections of March 5, 1933, resulting in a surge of Communist ballots in the tiny town. Locking up groups of civilians without trial had become accepted. Only the later realization of the horrors of the Nazi death camps would break the default assumption by governments and the public that concentration camps could and should be a simple way to manage populations seen as a threat.

      However, the staggering death toll of the Nazi extermination camp system—which was created mid-war and stood almost entirely separate from the concentration camps in existence since 1933—led to another result: a strange kind of erasure. In the decades that followed World War II, the term “concentration camp” came to stand only for Auschwitz and other extermination camps. It was no longer applied to the kind of extrajudicial detention it had denoted for generations. The many earlier camps that had made the rise of Auschwitz possible largely vanished from public memory.

      It is not necessary, however, to step back a full century in American history to find camps with links to what is happening on the US border today. Detention at Guantánamo began in the 1990s, when Haitian and Cuban immigrants whom the government wanted to keep out of the United States were housed there in waves over a four-year period—years before the “war on terror” and the US policy of rendition of suspected “enemy combatants” made Camps Delta, X-Ray, and Echo notorious. Tens of thousands of Haitians fleeing instability at home were picked up at sea and diverted to the Cuban base, to limit their legal right to apply for asylum. The court cases and battles over the suffering of those detainees ended up setting the stage for what Guantánamo would become after September 11, 2001.

      In one case, a federal court ruled that it did have jurisdiction over the base, but the government agreed to release the Haitians who were part of the lawsuit in exchange for keeping that ruling off the books. A ruling in a second case would assert that the courts did not have jurisdiction. Absent the prior case, the latter stood on its own as precedent. Leaving Guantánamo in this gray area made it an ideal site for extrajudicial detention and torture after the twin towers fell.

      This process of normalization, when a bad camp becomes much more dangerous, is not unusual. Today’s border camps are a crueler reflection of long-term policies—some challenged in court—that earlier presidents had enacted. Prior administrations own a share of the responsibility for today’s harsh practices, but the policies in place today are also accompanied by a shameless willingness to publicly target a vulnerable population in increasingly dangerous ways.

      I visited Guantánamo twice in 2015, sitting in the courtroom for pretrial hearings and touring the medical facility, the library, and all the old abandoned detention sites, as well as newly built ones, open to the media—from the kennel-style cages of Camp X-Ray rotting to ruin in the damp heat to the modern jailhouse facilities of Camp 6. Seeing all this in person made clear to me how vast the architecture of detention had become, how entrenched it was, and how hard it would be to close.

      Without a significant government effort to reverse direction, conditions in every camp system tend to deteriorate over time. Governments rarely make that kind of effort on behalf of people they are willing to lock up without trial in the first place. And history shows that legislatures do not close camps against the will of an executive.

      Just a few years ago there might have been more potential for change spurred by the judicial branch of our democracy, but this Supreme Court is inclined toward deference to executive power, even, it appears, if that power is abused. It seems unlikely this Court will intervene to end the new border camp system; indeed, the justices are far more likely to institutionalize it by half-measures, as happened with Guantánamo. The Korematsu case, in which the Supreme Court upheld Japanese-American internment (a ruling only rescinded last year), relied on the suppression of evidence by the solicitor general. Americans today can have little confidence that this administration would behave any more scrupulously when defending its detention policy.

      What kind of conditions can we expect to develop in these border camps? The longer a camp system stays open, the more likely it is that vital things will go wrong: detainees will contract contagious diseases and suffer from malnutrition and mental illness. We have already seen that current detention practices have resulted in children and adults succumbing to influenza, staph infections, and sepsis. The US is now poised to inflict harm on tens of thousands more, perhaps hundreds of thousands more.

      Along with such inevitable consequences, every significant camp system has introduced new horrors of its own, crises that were unforeseen when that system was opened. We have yet to discover what those will be for these American border camps. But they will happen. Every country thinks it can do detention better when it starts these projects. But no good way to conduct mass indefinite detention has yet been devised; the system always degrades.

      When, in 1940, Margarete Buber-Neumann was transferred from the Soviet Gulag at Karaganda to the camp for women at Ravensbrück (in an exchange enabled by the Nazi–Soviet Pact), she came from near-starvation conditions in the USSR and was amazed at the cleanliness and order of the Nazi camp. New arrivals were issued clothing, bedding, and silverware, and given fresh porridge, fruit, sausage, and jam to eat. Although the Nazi camps were already punitive, order-obsessed monstrosities, the wartime overcrowding that would soon overtake them had not yet made daily life a thing of constant suffering and squalor. The death camps were still two years away.

      The United States now has a vast and growing camp system. It is starting out with gruesome overcrowding and inadequate healthcare, and because of budget restrictions, has already taken steps to cut services to juvenile detainees. The US Office of Refugee Resettlement says that the mounting number of children arriving unaccompanied is forcing it to use military bases and other sites that it prefers to avoid, and that establishing these camps is a temporary measure. But without oversight from state child welfare inspectors, the possibilities for neglect and abuse are alarming. And without any knowledge of how many asylum-seekers are coming in the future, federal administrators are likely to find themselves boxed in to managing detention on military sites permanently.

      President Trump and senior White House adviser Stephen Miller appear to have purged the Department of Homeland Security of most internal opposition to their anti-immigrant policies. In doing so, that have removed even those sympathetic to the general approach taken by the White House, such as former Chief of Staff John Kelly and former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, in order to escalate the militarization of the border and expand irregular detention in more systematic and punitive ways. This kind of power struggle or purge in the early years of a camp system is typical.

      The disbanding of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, in February 1922 and the transfer of its commander, Felix Dzerzhinsky, to head up an agency with control over only two prisons offered a hint of an alternate future in which extrajudicial detention would not play a central role in the fledgling Soviet republic. But Dzerzhinsky managed to keep control over the “special camps” in his new position, paving the way for the emergence of a camp-centered police state. In pre-war Germany in the mid-1930s, Himmler’s struggle to consolidate power from rivals eventually led him to make camps central to Nazi strategy. When the hardliners win, as they appear to have in the US, conditions tend to worsen significantly.

      Is it possible this growth in the camp system will be temporary and the improvised border camps will soon close? In theory, yes. But the longer they remain open, the less likely they are to vanish. When I visited the camps for Rohingya Muslims a year before the large-scale campaign of ethnic cleansing began, many observers appeared to be confusing the possible and the probable. It was possible that the party of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi would sweep into office in free elections and begin making changes. It was possible that full democracy would come to all the residents of Myanmar, even though the government had stripped the Rohingya of the last vestiges of their citizenship. These hopes proved to be misplaced. Once there are concentration camps, it is always probable that things will get worse.

      The Philippines, Japanese-American internment, Guantánamo… we can consider the fine points of how the current border camps evoke past US systems, and we can see how the arc of camp history reveals the likelihood that the suffering we’re currently inflicting will be multiplied exponentially. But we can also simply look at what we’re doing right now, shoving bodies into “dog pound”-style detention pens, “iceboxes,” and standing room-only spaces. We can look at young children in custody who have become suicidal. How much more historical awareness do we really need?

      https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/06/21/some-suburb-of-hell-americas-new-concentration-camp-system

    • #Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez engage le bras de fer avec la politique migratoire de Donald Trump

      L’élue de New York a qualifié les camps de rétention pour migrants érigés à la frontière sud des Etats-Unis de « camps de concentration ».

      https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/06/19/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-engage-le-bras-de-fer-avec-la-politique-migratoire-

  • Info sur la refonte de la #Directive_Retour et les futurs projets de réforme du #régime_d'asile_européen_commun

    info sur la prochaine étape européenne en matière de politique migratoire. Plus précisément sur la refonte de la Directive Retour qui va passer au vote en #LIBE et aussi des infos sur l’évolution du Régime d’Asile Européen Commun (#RAEC), histoire d’informer de ce vers quoi l’on tend probablement pour la prochaine législature (donc le prochain mandat).

    Dans un effort pour réformer le Régime d’Asile Européen Commun (RAEC) et tendre vers une #uniformisation du droit d’asile au niveau européen, les directives sont revues une à une depuis quelques années (Directive Accueil, Procédure, Qualification et Retour + le règlement Dublin qui est au point mort depuis 2017 à cause du Conseil Européen).
    Ces #révisions rentrent dans le cadre de l’#agenda_européen_pour_les_migrations qui a été élaboré en 2015 par la Commission sous ordre du Conseil Européen.

    Le package est en état d’avancement prochain et l’étape la plus proche semble concerner la refonte de la Directive Retour.
    Néanmoins, il y a également un nombre assez important de dispositifs prévus dont il est peut-être pas inintéressant d’évoquer dans le sillage de l’analyse sur cette Directive.

    Il y a donc deux parties dans ce mail d’info : la première sur le Régime d’Asile Européen Commun (RAEC) et ce qu’il préfigure ; la seconde sur le texte de la Directive Retour plus précisément.

    Le Régime d’Asile Européen Commun :

    Il y a de nombreux discours actuellement autour de la mise en place d’un droit d’asile "harmonisé" au niveau européen.

    C’est une obsession de Macron depuis son élection. Il a réaffirmé, lors de la restitution du Grand Débat, sa volonté d’une Europe au régime d’asile commun : "c’est aussi une Europe qui tient ses frontières, qui les protège. C’est une Europe qui a un droit d’asile refondé et commun et où la #responsabilité va avec la #solidarité."
    https://www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2019/04/25/conference-de-presse-grand-debat-national

    La confusion est telle que les journalistes ne semblent pas toujours comprendre si ce régime d’asile commun existe ou non.

    Sur france inter par exemple :
    "Cela fait plusieurs années que l’on parle de la mise en place d’un régime d’asile européen commun. Nous en sommes encore très loin mais plusieurs textes sont actuellement en discussion, sur les procédures, sur l’accueil, les qualifications, les réinstallations, la création d’une agence européenne pour l’asile "
    https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/cafe-europe/cafe-europe-24-fevrier-2018

    Et non... ça ne fait pas plusieurs années qu’on en parle... ça fait plusieurs années qu’il existe !

    Historique :

    En vérité, cette tentative d’harmonisation des législations est ancienne et date à peu près du Conseil Européen de #Tampere en 1999 qui donna les premières impulsions pour la mise en place du Régime d’Asile Européen Commun avec tout ce que l’on connait maintenant à savoir par exemple, le #règlement_Dublin.
    Ici le résumé des orientations du Conseil sont claires :
    "il faut, pour les domaines distincts, mais étroitement liés, de l’#asile et des #migrations, élaborer une politique européenne commune (...) Il est convenu de travailler à la mise en place d’un régime d’asile européen commun, fondé sur l’application intégrale et globale de la Convention de Genève. (...) Ce régime devrait comporter, à court terme, une méthode claire et opérationnelle pour déterminer l’Etat responsable de l’examen d’une demande d’asile, des normes communes pour une procédure d’asile équitable et efficace, des conditions communes minimales d’#accueil des demandeurs d’asile, et le rapprochement des règles sur la reconnaissance et le contenu du statut de réfugié."
    http://www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/tam_fr.htm#a

    Vous avez ici les bases du RAEC et notamment du règlement Dublin qui vise justement à la détermination de l’#Etat_responsable de l’asile afin de lutter contre le "#shopping_de_l'asile", un """"fléau""""" qui avait déjà touché l’Europe durant les années 90 avec la crise des Balkans (en 1992, 700 000 personnes environ ont demandé l’asile en Europe, ce qui signifie par ailleurs que non... 2015 n’est pas une situation si inédite. La situation s’est stabilisée après 1993 où 500 000 personnes ont demandé l’asile, puis 300 000 dans les années qui ont suivi, mais pas au point de ne pas "forcer" les pays à réagir au niveau européen).
    https://www.persee.fr/doc/homig_1142-852x_1996_num_1198_1_2686

    Cet acte fondateur du #Conseil_de_Tampere est corroboré par plusieurs documents et on peut en trouver aussi confirmation par exemple dans le rapport sur la #politique_européenne_de_Retour (rédigé tous les trois ans) qui commence par :
    "L’Union européenne s’efforce depuis 1999 de mettre au point une approche globale sur la question des migrations, qui couvre l’#harmonisation des conditions d’admission, les droits des ressortissants de pays tiers en séjour régulier ainsi que l’élaboration de mesures juridiques et le renforcement d’une coopération pratique en matière de prévention des flux migratoires irréguliers."
    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/?uri=celex:52014DC0199

    Bref, à partir de 1999 et donc du Conseil de Tampere, la direction est prise de mener une politique migratoire à l’échelle européenne pour renforcer le contrôle des frontières extérieures.

    Les Textes du RAEC, l’échec de l’harmonisation et les règlements qui nous attendent en conséquence :

    Le Conseil (donc les États) ordonné à Tampere et donc la Commission exécute en proposant plusieurs textes qui vont dessiner le paysage actuel du droit d’asile européen commun.

    Un ensemble de textes est donc créé et adopté :

    Le règlement Dublin succède donc à la convention de Dublin en 2003
    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A8glement_Dublin_II
    Avec son frère le règlement #Eurodac qui permet la mise en oeuvre de #Dublin aussi en 2003 (logique) :
    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurodac

    #Frontex est lancé en 2004 :
    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agence_europ%C3%A9enne_pour_la_gestion_de_la_coop%C3%A9ration_op%C3%A9

    Et les directives qui constituent le coeur du Régime d’Asile Européen Commun avec le règlement Dublin sont lancées dans la foulée :

    La #Directive_Accueil en 2003 (puis réformée en 2013)
    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32013L0033

    La #Directive_Procédure en 2005 (réformée aussi en 2013)
    https://www.easo.europa.eu/sites/default/files/public/Procedures-FR.pdf

    La #Directive_Qualification en 2004 (réformée en 2011)
    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32011L0095

    La Directive Retour en 2008 (qui va être réformée maintenant)
    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM%3Ajl0014

    L’ensemble de ces textes avait pour but d’harmoniser les législations nationales européennes (pour le meilleur et pour le pire d’ailleurs).
    Le problème concerne donc, non pas l’absence de législations européennes communes, mais plutôt les marges de manoeuvres des Etats dans l’interprétation des Directives et leur transposition dans les législations nationales. Cette marge de manoeuvre est telle qu’elle permet aux Etats de retenir ce qui les arrange dans tel ou tel texte, de sorte que toute tentative d’harmonisation est impossible.

    Dès lors, la diversité des procédures est toujours la norme d’un pays à l’autre ; un pays comme les Pays-Bas donne 4 ans de protection subsidiaire, tandis que la France avant la loi Asile n’en donnait qu’une ; la liste des pays sûrs n’est pas la même selon les Etats .... etc etc etc

    Les Etats ont tellement la main que finalement, on peut assez facilement conclure à l’#échec total des tentatives d’harmonisation et donc du RAEC, tant les Etats ont, du début à la fin, fait un peu près ce qu’ils voulaient avec les textes.
    (voir également Sarah Lamort : https://www.amazon.fr/Europe-terre-dasile-Sarah-Lamort/dp/2130734669)

    La Commission a elle-même très bien compris ces faiblesses.

    Exaspérée elle déclare en 2016 que malgré ses efforts pour la mise en place effective du RAEC : " il existe encore des différences notables entre les États membres dans les types de procédures utilisés, les conditions d’accueil offertes aux demandeurs, les #taux_de_reconnaissance et le type de protection octroyé aux bénéficiaires d’une protection internationale. Ces #divergences contribuent à des #mouvements_secondaires et à une course à l’asile (« #asylum_shopping »), créent des facteurs d’attraction et conduisent en définitive à une répartition inégale entre les États membres de la responsabilité d’offrir une protection à ceux qui en ont besoin.(...) Ces #disparités résultent en partie des dispositions souvent discrétionnaires qui figurent dans la version actuelle de la directive relative aux procédures d’asile et de celle relative aux conditions d’accueil." et de toutes les autres en vérité pouvons-nous ajouter...
    L’objectif est donc de "renforcer et harmoniser davantage les règles du régime d’asile européen commun, de façon à assurer une plus grande égalité de traitement dans l’ensemble de l’Union et à réduire les facteurs d’attraction injustifiés qui encouragent les départs vers l’UE" (les facteurs d’attraction étant le "shopping de l’asile")

    Et pour cela la Commission propose de transformer quasiment toutes les Directives citées plus haut en Règlement... :
    " la Commission proposera un nouveau règlement instituant une procédure d’asile commune unique dans l’Union et remplaçant la directive relative aux procédures d’asile ; un nouveau règlement relatif aux conditions que doivent remplir les demandeurs d’asile remplaçant l’actuelle directive du même nom, et des modifications ciblées de la directive relative aux conditions d’accueil."
    https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2016/FR/1-2016-197-FR-F1-1.PDF

    La différence entre la Directive et le Règlement étant que justement la Directive est soumise à une interprétation des Etats dans la transposition au sein des législations nationales de la dite Directive (dont on voit qu’elle est large), tandis qu’un Règlement est contraignant et s’applique sans interprétation, ni marge de manoeuvre whatsoever à tous les Etats (comme le règlement Dublin).
    Ici par exemple, la Commission propose de changer la Directive Procédure en un Règlement, histoire par exemple, que tous les pays aient la même liste de pays d’origine sûrs une bonne fois pour toute : https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52016PC0467

    Ce processus d’abrogation des #directives pour en faire des #règlements est en cours et il est très important puisque cela signifie qu’il va falloir surveiller de très près les dispositions qui vont apparaitre dans ces nouveaux textes qui vont TOUS s’appliquer stricto sensu.
    Ce n’est pas forcément une bonne nouvelle.

    Reste que les Etats pourraient s’opposer à l’imposition de textes aussi coercitifs et d’ailleurs, ils ont eux-mêmes bloqué la révision du règlement Dublin. Cela pose la question de l’Etat d’avancement.

    Etat d’avancement :
    Depuis l’annonce de la transformation des Directives en Règlements en 2016, les dossiers ne semblent pas avoir tant avancés que cela pour autant que je sache sauf concernant quelques dossiers majeurs, notamment la Directive Retour.

    Concernant la mise en place des règlements, la Commission est très vague dans sa dernière communication sur l’état d’avancement de l’agenda européen matière de migrations de mars 2019 : https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2019:0126:FIN:FR:PDF
    En décembre 2017, elle disait :
    "Présentées il y a un an et demi, ces propositions en sont à des stades d’avancement différents dans le processus législatif. Certaines, comme la proposition concernant l’Agence de l’Union européenne pour l’asile et la réforme d’Eurodac, sont sur le point d’être adoptées. D’autres, à savoir le cadre de l’Union pour la réinstallation, le règlement relatif aux conditions que doivent remplir les demandeurs d’asile et la directive relative aux conditions d’accueil, progressent. En revanche, la proposition de règlement sur les procédures d’asile et, comme pierre angulaire, la proposition de révision du règlement de Dublin, nécessitent encore un travail considérable. Dans ce contexte, il convient aussi de progresser dans les travaux sur la notion de pays tiers sûr au sens de l’UE, en tenant compte des conclusions du Conseil européen de juin"
    https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2017/FR/COM-2017-820-F1-FR-MAIN-PART-1.PDF

    Il y a donc fort à parier qu’en à peine 1 an et demi, les choses n’aient pas beaucoup avancées concernant les règlements.
    Bref, comme il était assez attendu, ce qui ne contraint pas totalement les Etats avancent et le reste piétine pour le moment.

    Par contre, elles avancent concernant la politique des retours et donc la Directive Retour !

    Politique des retours et externalisation de l’asile :

    Après le Conseil de Tampere en 1999, vient la "crise des migrants" en 2015, qui ne fera qu’accélérer les constatations de l’échec du RAEC.

    Le Conseil européen lance donc une réunion spéciale en avril 2015 qui annonce un changement de stratégie vers l’extérieur avec notamment un renforcement de la coopération avec les pays tiers pour le "contrôle de l’immigration". Ordre est donné à la Commission de mobiliser tous les moyens nécessaires pour mettre cette nouvelle stratégie en oeuvre.
    Ce n’est pas le lancement officiel de l’externalisation de l’Asile puisque le processus de Khartoum et de Rabat sont antérieurs et déjà lancés.
    Néanmoins, il me parait assez évident personnellement qu’un coup d’accélérateur à la stratégie d’externalisation sera donné à partir de ce Conseil qui sera entièrement tourné vers la coopération internationale :
    https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2015/04/23/special-euco-statement

    Dans le prolongement logique des décisions prises lors du Conseil d’avril 2015 et de l’orientation stratégique vers l’extérieur, le Conseil Européen lancera le Sommet de la Valette en novembre où il invitera un nombre conséquent de pays africains.
    Ainsi le Sommet de la Valette, "fut l’occasion de reconnaître que la gestion des migrations relève de la responsabilité commune des pays d’origine, de transit et de destination. L’UE et l’Afrique ont travaillé dans un esprit de partenariat afin de trouver des solutions communes aux défis d’intérêt commun."
    https://www.consilium.europa.eu/fr/meetings/international-summit/2015/11/11-12

    C’est après ce Sommet que seront initiés le Fond Fiduciaire, les accords avec la Turquie, la Libye, les garde-côtes, la transformation de Frontex etc
    Bien que tout cela ait été préparé en amont.

    Après les ordres du Conseil, la Commission s’exécute avec l’Agenda Européen en Matière de Migrations et la focale sur les retours :
    Devant la stratégie d’orientation du Conseil qui demande des réformes fortes et des actions pour transformer la politique européenne d’asile, la Commission s’exécute en mai 2015 avec l’Agenda Européen des migrations :https://ec.europa.eu/france/node/859_fr

    Cet agenda met l’emphase sur un nombre impressionnant de points, mais une large part est également réservée aux retours page 11 et 12 (puisqu’il faudrait s’assurer que les retours soient efficaces et effectifs d’après la Commission).
    https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/what-we-do/policies/european-agenda-migration/background-information/docs/communication_on_the_european_agenda_on_migration_fr.pdf

    Dans la foulée la Commission lance donc une réflexion sur la politique des retours qui culminera la même année en 2015 avec The Action Plan of Return.
    L’action plan partira d’un principe assez simple, si les migrants viennent, c’est parce qu’on ne les renvoie pas...
    "The European Agenda on Migration, adopted by the European Commission on 13 May 2015, highlighted that one of the incentives for irregular migration is the knowledge that the EU’s system to return irregular migrants is not sufficiently effective"
    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52015DC0453

    Ce plan est censé résoudre ce problème.
    Mais il sera aussi un relatif échec, ce qui n’empêchera pas la Commission d’insister en lançant un nouveau plan en 2017, The Renewed Action Plan on return :
    "Despite this, the overall impact on the return track record across the European Union remained limited, showing that more resolute action is needed to bring measurable results in returning irregular migrants. "
    https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/files/what-we-do/policies/european-agenda-migration/20170302_a_more_effective_return_policy_in_the_european_union_-_a_renewed_

    Toujours dans la foulée d’une politique d’expulsion efficace, il sera discuté plus tard (en mars 2019 sur l’évaluation de l’application de l’agenda européen) de la meilleure façon d’exécuter les retours en Europe. C’est là où nous en sommes.
    Pour la mise en place d’une politique de retour efficace, il y a donc deux stratégies :

    1) renforcer les accords de réadmission avec des accords bilatéraux ou par le biais des accords de Cotonou (qui vont être révisés et qui ont beaucoup tourné autour des migrations justement...on en reparlera un jour).
    "Concernant donc "les retours et la réadmission, l’UE continue d’œuvrer à la conclusion d’accords et d’arrangements en matière de réadmission avec les pays partenaires, 23 accords et arrangements ayant été conclus jusqu’à présent. Les États membres doivent maintenant tirer pleinement parti des accords existants."
    http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-19-1496_fr.htm

    2) renforcer les procédures de retour depuis l’Europe.
    La Commission espère en conséquence que "le Parlement européen et le Conseil devraient adopter rapidement la proposition de la Commission en matière de retour, qui vise à limiter les abus et la fuite des personnes faisant l’objet d’un retour au sein de l’Union"
    http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-19-1496_fr.htm

    C’est pourquoi la Commission propose de revoir la Directive Retour.

    La Directive Retour :
    La directive retour est donc la prochaine directive sur la liste des refontes.
    Ce sera un gros sujet a priori puisque la prochaine étape c’est le vote en Commission LIBE avant donc le vote en plénière.
    L’échéance est donc proche et les discussions bien avancées.

    Un texte problématique :

    Article 6 et 16
    En gros, les problèmes qui se posent avec ce texte ont surtout à voir avec l’article 6 qui décrit une liste de 16 critères de "risque de fuites", les derniers étant particulièrement dangereux puisqu’il semblerait que "résister aux procédures de retour" ou "refuser de donner ses empreintes" peuvent représenter des risques de fuites....
    Cet élargissement des critères est à mettre en lien avec l’article 18 qui permet la détention de toutes les personnes qui représentent un risque de fuite. Avec un élargissement pareil des critères de "fuites", je crains que l’on ne se donne le droit d’enfermer tout le monde.

    Article 7
    L’article 7 oblige les Etats tiers à coopérer dans les procédures de retour.
    L’application de cet article me semblait complexe mais le Brief du Parlement sur la Directive au paragraphe "Council" (donc sur les discussions au Conseil) ajoute que les Etats réfléchissent à la possibilité de sanctions pour les pays tiers en cas de non-respect de cette obligation de coopération.
    Et à ce moment-là j’ai compris.... Ma théorie c’est qu’un chantage quelconque pourra être mis en place pour établir une pression forçant les Etats tiers à coopérer.
    Tout le problème tient sur l’amplitude des sanctions possibles. Je n’en vois pas beaucoup, sauf à menacer de rompre des accords commerciaux ou de développement.

    C’est déjà plus ou moins le cas via le Fond Fiduciaire ou les fonds d’aide au dvp puisque l’on voit parfois que l’aide au dvp dépend de la mise en place d’accords de réadmission.
    Par exemple : l’UE et l’Afghanistan ont signé un accord de réadmission en Octobre 2016 : https://eeas.europa.eu/sites/eeas/files/eu_afghanistan_joint_way_forward_on_migration_issues.pdf
    Et dans la foulée d’octobre, 5 milliards d’aide au dvp étaient débloqués pour la période 2016-2020 à la conférence de Bruxelles (https://eeas.europa.eu/sites/eeas/files/eu-afghanistan_march_2019.pdf).

    Avec une opération pareille, des soupçons de chantage à l’aide au dvp me paraissent tout à fait légitime.
    Cependant, ils existaient une séparation dans la forme. C’est-à-dire que même si les liens peuvent sembler évidents, les accords de réadmission n’établissaient pas directement de chantage entre l’un et l’autre. Il n’était pas écrit que des "sanctions" étaient possibles (du moins pas dans l’exemple de l’Afghanistan ni même dans l’accord de Cotonou - exception faite de ce qui concerne l’article 96 et le respect des droits—et dans aucun autre texte à ma connaissance).
    Ici le Conseil veut faire un pas de plus dans la direction d’une politique assumée de pressions via des sanctions et donc, indirectement semble-t-il, de chantage.

    Les Pays Tiers-Sûrs
    Un autre élément dangereux dans ce paragraphe sur le Conseil dans le Brief du Parlement : c’est que les Etats de leur côté réfléchissent aussi à la possibilité de renvoyer une personne dans un pays tiers considéré comme sûr qui ne soit pas le pays d’origine.
    En d’autres termes, renvoyer les soudanais par exemple, en Egypte par exemple légalement.

    Cela rejoint a priori les discussions sur la notion de pays tiers sûrs que la Commission et le Conseil continuent de vouloir développer depuis très longtemps malgré les oppositions franches des ONG (http://www.forumrefugies.org/s-informer/actualites/le-concept-de-pays-tiers-sur-une-remise-en-cause-profonde-de-l-acces-) ou même l’avis défavorable de la Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme en 2017 (https://www.cncdh.fr/sites/default/files/171219_avis_concept_pays_tiers_sur_5.pdf)
    On ferait ici un pas de plus au sein du creuset initié par la politique des "pays d’origine sûrs" et on s’offrirait le droit de renvoyer des personnes dans des pays qui n’auraient pas les conditions pour les accueillir dignement (tant matériellement que du point de vue du respect des droits...).

    Article 22
    L’article 22 est aussi très problématique puisque les dispositions aux frontières devraient changer :
    Les migrants en zone d’attente devraient recevoir une décision de retour simplifiée plutôt qu’une explication motivée.
    Il ne devrait plus y avoir aucune chance de départ volontaire, sauf si le migrant possède un document de voyage en cours de validité (remis aux autorités) et coopère pleinement (car s’il ne coopère pas, on l’a vu, il peut être déclaré en "tentative de fuite" ou en "fuite").
    Concernant les recours, les migrants ne disposeront que de 48 heures pour faire appel d’une décision de retour fondée sur un rejet de l’asile à la frontière, et l’effet suspensif ne s’appliquera qu’à la présentation de nouvelles conclusions importantes (type CNDA) ou qu’il n’y a pas déjà eu de contrôle juridictionnel effectif.

    Article 16
    D’ailleurs, les recours peuvent subir un changement relativement dramatique à cause de l’article 16. Selon le brief de la Commission :
    " Proposed Article 16(4) imposes a general obligation on Member States to establish ‘reasonable’ time limits. In relation to appeals lodged against return decisions adopted as a consequence of a decision rejecting an application for international protection, Member States would have to establish a time limit for lodging an appeal of a maximum of five days, but would be free to fix a shorter period."
    http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2019/637901/EPRS_BRI(2019)637901_EN.pdf
    Une manière de réduire encore plus les possibilités de recours.

    Article 13
    L’article 13 apporte aussi des changements aux refus d’entrée : " the proposal would allow Member States to impose an isolated entry ban, not accompanied by a corresponding return decision, if the irregularity of a stay is detected when the third-country national is exiting the territory of a Member State"
    http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2019/637901/EPRS_BRI(2019)637901_EN.pdf

    Néanmoins, j’ai pour le moment du mal à évaluer l’étendue de cette proposition à l’article 13 et il faudrait peut-être en discuter avec l’anafé par exemple.

    #procédure_d'asile #réforme

    Reçu par email via la mailing-list Migreurop, le 06.06.2019

    • New EU deportation law breaches fundamental rights standards and should be rejected

      A proposed new EU law governing standards and procedures for deportations would breach fundamental rights standards, massively expand the use of detention, limit appeal rights and undermine ’voluntary’ return initiatives. It should be rejected by the European Parliament and the Council, argues a new analysis published today by Statewatch. [1]

      The original Returns Directive was agreed in 2008, but a proposal for a ’recast’ version was published by the European Commission in September 2018 as one a number of measures aiming to crack down on “illegally staying third-country nationals” in the EU. [2]

      The proposal aims to increase the number of deportations from the EU by reducing or eliminating existing safeguards for those facing deportation proceedings - but even if such a method could be considered legitimate, there is no evidence to suggest that the proposed measures will have the intended effect.

      For example, the proposal introduces numerous new grounds for placing migrants in detention and would introduce a new ’minimum maximum’ period of detention of at least three months. [3]

      However, in 2017, Spain (with a maximum detention period of 60 days) had a ’return rate’ of 37%, while the return rate from countries with a detention limit of 18 months (the maximum period permitted under the current Returns Directive) differed significantly: 11% in the Czech Republic, 18% in Belgium, 40% in Greece and 46% in Germany. [4]

      The report urges EU lawmakers to discard the proposal and focus on alternative measures that would be less harmful to individuals. It includes an article-by-article analysis of the Commission’s proposal and the positions of the European Parliament and the Council, as they were prior to the EU institutions’ summer break.

      The European Parliament and the Council of the EU will begin discussing the proposal again in the coming weeks.

      Quotes

      Statewatch researcher Jane Kilpatrick said:

      “The proposed recast prioritises detention for more people and for longer durations - the physical and mental harms of which are well-known, especially for people with prior traumatic experiences - over any collaborative measures. The recast would remove the option for states to adopt measures more respectful of human rights and health. The fact that it hasn’t relied on any evidence that these will even work suggests it is a political exercise to appease anti-migrant rhetoric.”

      Chris Jones, a researcher at Statewatch, added:

      “The EU cannot claim to be a bastion of human rights at the same time as trying to undermine or eliminate existing safeguards for third-country nationals subject to deportation proceedings. Given that there is no evidence to suggest the proposed measures would actually work, it seems that lawmakers are dealing with a proposal that would be both harmful and ineffective. The previous MEP responsible for the proposal did a good job of trying to improve it - but it would be better to reject it altogether.”

      http://www.statewatch.org/news/2019/sep/eu-returns-directive.htm

    • New EU deportation law breaches fundamental rights standards and should be rejected

      A proposed new EU law governing standards and procedures for deportations would breach fundamental rights standards, massively expand the use of detention, limit appeal rights and undermine ’voluntary’ return initiatives. It should be rejected by the European Parliament and the Council, argues a new analysis published today by Statewatch. [1]

      The original Returns Directive was agreed in 2008, but a proposal for a ’recast’ version was published by the European Commission in September 2018 as one a number of measures aiming to crack down on “illegally staying third-country nationals” in the EU. [2]

      The proposal aims to increase the number of deportations from the EU by reducing or eliminating existing safeguards for those facing deportation proceedings - but even if such a method could be considered legitimate, there is no evidence to suggest that the proposed measures will have the intended effect.

      For example, the proposal introduces numerous new grounds for placing migrants in detention and would introduce a new ’minimum maximum’ period of detention of at least three months. [3]

      However, in 2017, Spain (with a maximum detention period of 60 days) had a ’return rate’ of 37%, while the return rate from countries with a detention limit of 18 months (the maximum period permitted under the current Returns Directive) differed significantly: 11% in the Czech Republic, 18% in Belgium, 40% in Greece and 46% in Germany. [4]

      The report urges EU lawmakers to discard the proposal and focus on alternative measures that would be less harmful to individuals. It includes an article-by-article analysis of the Commission’s proposal and the positions of the European Parliament and the Council, as they were prior to the EU institutions’ summer break.

      The European Parliament and the Council of the EU will begin discussing the proposal again in the coming weeks.

      Quotes

      Statewatch researcher Jane Kilpatrick said:

      “The proposed recast prioritises detention for more people and for longer durations - the physical and mental harms of which are well-known, especially for people with prior traumatic experiences - over any collaborative measures. The recast would remove the option for states to adopt measures more respectful of human rights and health. The fact that it hasn’t relied on any evidence that these will even work suggests it is a political exercise to appease anti-migrant rhetoric.”

      Chris Jones, a researcher at Statewatch, added:

      “The EU cannot claim to be a bastion of human rights at the same time as trying to undermine or eliminate existing safeguards for third-country nationals subject to deportation proceedings. Given that there is no evidence to suggest the proposed measures would actually work, it seems that lawmakers are dealing with a proposal that would be both harmful and ineffective. The previous MEP responsible for the proposal did a good job of trying to improve it - but it would be better to reject it altogether.”

      http://www.statewatch.org/news/2019/sep/eu-returns-directive.htm

  • « Choc des civilisations » ou crise de civilisation ?
    Par Pepe Escobar – Le 20 mai 2019 – Source The Saker - Traduit par jj, relu par Cat pour le Saker Francophone
    https://lesakerfrancophone.fr/choc-des-civilisations-ou-crise-de-civilisation

    (...) Quo vadis, humanité ?

    Il n’est pas difficile de détecter le sourire subtil sur le visage des stratèges chinois lorsqu’ils contemplent « le vaste panorama » du point de vue de leurs 5 000 ans de civilisation. L’Occident chrétien, en tant que paradigme unique pour délivrer l’humanité du mal – en fait, l’instauration de la Pax Americana – est considéré au mieux comme une fiction amusante.

    Cette fiction a maintenant l’air carrément dangereuse, se vautrant dans l’exceptionnalisme et la diabolisation de « L’Autre » sous une multitude de formes. L’Autre – de la République islamique d’Iran à la Chine athée, en passant par la Russie « autocratique » – est automatiquement qualifié d’incarnation du « mal ».

    La Chine, au contraire, est polythéiste, pluraliste et multipolaire. Elle loge le confucianisme, le bouddhisme et le taoïsme. Cela se reflète dans la tendance actuelle vers un système mondial multipolaire. Ce qui compte, c’est l’unité dans la multiplicité – comme Xi l’a souligné dans son discours liminaire. On y trouve la Chine et la Perse, deux civilisations anciennes – liées par l’ancienne Route de la soie – et qui se ressemblent, non pas par accident.

    Ensuite, il y a l’état épouvantable de la planète, qui éclipse le spectacle actuel, aussi épouvantable, de la folie politique. Le géographe de l’UCLA [Université de Californie à Los Angeles] et auteur de best seller mondiaux, Jared Diamond, n’est pas très précis, mais il estime qu’il y a 50% de chances pour « que le monde tel que nous le connaissons s’effondre d’ici à 2050 ». (...)

    • Far from quiet on the US vs Russia-China front
      By Pepe Escobar - May 29, 2019
      https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/05/article/far-from-quiet-on-the-us-vs-russia-china-front

      Kazakhs fear impacts of new ‘cold war’, but Putin is adamant Eurasian integration will go ahead

      Let’s start in mid-May, when Nur-Sultan, formerly Astana, hosted the third Russia-Kazakhstan Expert Forum, jointly organized by premier think tank Valdai Club and the Kazakhstan Council on International Relations.

      The ongoing, laborious and crucial interconnection of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative and the Eurasia Economic Union was at the center of the debates. Kazakhstan is a pivotal member of both the BRI and EAEU.

      As Valdai Club top analyst Yaroslav Lissovolik told me, there was much discussion “on the state of play in emerging markets in light of the developments associated with the US-China trade stand-off.” What emerged was the necessity of embracing “open regionalism” as a factor to neutralize “the negative protectionist trends in the global economy.”

      This translates as regional blocks along a vast South-South axis harnessing their huge potential “to counter protections pressures”, with “different forms of economic integration other than trade liberalization” having preeminence. Enter “connectivity” – BRI’s premier focus.

      The EAEU, celebrating its fifth anniversary this year, is fully into the open regionalism paradigm, according to Lissovolik, with memoranda of understanding signed with Mercosur, ASEAN, and more free-trade agreements coming up later this year, including Serbia and Singapore. (...)

  • PRONUNCIAMIENTO ANTE EL HOSTIGAMIENTO HACIA EL CONGRESO NACIONAL INDÍGENA- CONCEJO INDÍGENA DE GOBIERNO Y EL EJÉRCITO ZAPATISTA DE LIBERACIÓN NACIONAL - Congreso Nacional Indígena
    https://www.congresonacionalindigena.org/2019/04/19/pronunciamiento-ante-el-hostigamiento-hacia-el-congreso-na

    Éventuelle traduction :

    Dans ce texte, nous nous faisons l’écho de la dénonciation publique de l’Armée Zapatiste de Libération Nationale dans son communiqué du 10 avril 2019, concernant le harcèlement et la répression des Communautés Zapatistes par le mauvais gouvernement représenté par Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
    Nous exprimons notre solidarité et notre soutien inconditionnel au Congrès National Indigène, au Conseil de Gouvernement Indigène, à l’Armée Zapatiste de Libération Nationale, à ses Bases et Réseaux de Soutien, qui partagent la Lutte et la Résistance contre l’attaque de la classe capitaliste et ses gouvernements fantômes. Nous dénonçons et soutenons la lutte contre : La présence policière et militaire qui augmente dans les vallées et les montagnes des territoires zapatistes, avec des survols d’avions et d’hélicoptères, avec plus d’agressivité que sous les précédents régimes du PRI, et non pas précisément à la suite de trafiquants de drogue ou de Huachicoleros, mais menaçant les communautés indigènes qui ont décidé de défendre leur vie et leur territoire par la Résistance dignifiée et la rébellion contre ce mauvais gouvernement.
    Cette Quatrième Transformation est la continuation et l’approfondissement de cette étape brutale et sanguinaire du capitalisme, dans laquelle la remise de la terre, de l’eau, des forêts et des jungles aux grandes entreprises nationales et étrangères de pillage via des mégaprojets, tels que le train dit Maya et le corridor industriel transisthmien, se déroule. Tout cela au profit de la classe dirigeante mexicaine : la bourgeoisie ; qui ne sont rien de plus que les hommes de paille des sociétés transnationales, qui sont ceux qui imposent à leurs gouvernements marionnettes et servile comme le gouvernement actuel, même s’ils veulent s’habiller en progressistes et humanistes, et se mettre dans leur tenue « démocratique » de 32 millions de voix. Le cas du train maya avec l’investissement de Trump annoncé par le Président révèle une fois de plus la reddition de notre pays aux sociétés transnationales et la destruction de l’ordre écologique.
    Nous appelons à l’unité en menant des actions nationales et internationales pour mettre fin à cette campagne de provocations et de harcèlement par les forces répressives de l’État mexicain contre les communautés et les peuples originaux en lutte et en résistance.

    Nous tenons directement responsables le Président de la République mexicaine, ainsi que les pouvoirs législatif et judiciaire et les partis politiques de l’aggravation du conflit dans les zones rebelles qui ont une fois de plus été trahies par les désirs expansionnistes du gouvernement et la mafia du pouvoir.

    Traduit avec www.DeepL.com/Translator

    À propos du « Train Maya » (bien que l’article référencé ci-dessous ne s’inscrive que dans un contexte extractiviste et capital-friendly tout en évoquant « l’écologie » ! ...)

    http://www.actulatino.com/2018/12/20/mexique-le-train-maya-ce-projet-touristique-pour-le-sud-du-pays-qui-inqu

    #Mexique #AMLO

  • Nicolas Lebourg : « Les ralliements de gauche, marginaux, servent le storytelling du RN »
    https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/160519/nicolas-lebourg-les-ralliements-de-gauche-marginaux-servent-le-storytellin

    Le Rassemblement national s’est réjoui du soutien que vient de lui apporter un élu insoumis. Selon l’historien Nicolas Lebourg, cet épisode nourrit sa rhétorique du « ni droite, ni gauche », ancienne mais pas moins fictive.

    #POLITIQUE #Nicolas_Lebourg,_Front_national,_andrea_kotarac,_extrême-droite,_Rassemblement_national

  • « Actes de sabotage » contre deux pétroliers saoudiens
    https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/05/13/actes-de-sabotage-contre-deux-petroliers-saoudiens_5461284_3210.html

    Quatre navires de commerce ont été visés par des « opérations de sabotage » à proximité des eaux territoriales des Emirats arabes unis, a annoncé dimanche 12 mai le ministère des affaires étrangères émirati, ajoutant qu’il n’y a pas eu de victimes.

    L’incident s’est produit près de l’émirat du Foujeyrah, situé à la sortie du détroit d’Ormuz, voie maritime vitale pour le commerce du pétrole.

    Le ministre de l’énergie saoudien a déploré lundi que deux navires pétroliers saoudiens aient été victimes de « sabotage » et menacé la sécurité des livraisons de pétrole mondiales.

    Dans un communiqué transmis par l’agence de presse officielle saoudienne SPA, Khalid Al-Falih a expliqué que cette attaque n’avait fait aucune victime ni provoqué de déversement de pétrole. Des dommages importants ont été causés à la structure de l’un des deux navires, a-t-il précisé.

    Les Emirats n’ont fourni aucun détail sur la nature de ces actes de sabotage ni sur le pavillon des bâtiments visés. On ne dispose à ce stade d’aucune information sur les auteurs des ces « sabotages ». Aucune précision n’a pu être obtenue auprès du commandement de la 5e flotte américaine, basée au Bahreïn. « Soumettre des navires de commerce à des opérations de sabotage et menacer les vies des équipages est un développement dangereux », déclarait le ministère émirati dans un communiqué repris dimanche par l’agence de presse officielle WAM.

    • la dépêche Reuters initiale (le texte du Monde), 12/05 17h49, MàJ, 13/05 7h18 :

      UAE says four vessels subjected to ’sabotage’ near Fujairah port - Reuters
      https://www.reuters.com/article/us-emirates-fujairah-port-shipping-idUSKCN1SI0EG

      Four commercial vessels were targeted by “sabotage operations” near the territorial waters of the United Arab Emirates without causing casualties, the foreign ministry said on Sunday, without giving details of the nature of the sabotage.

      The incident occurred near the UAE emirate of Fujairah, one of the world’s largest bunkering hubs which lies just outside the Strait of Hormuz, the ministry said in a statement.

      Trading and industry sources said operations at Fujairah port ran smoothly on Sunday.

      The strait, a vital global oil and gas shipping route, separates the Gulf states and Iran, which has been embroiled in an escalating war of words with the United States over U.S. sanctions and the U.S. military’s regional presence.

      Subjecting commercial vessels to sabotage operations and threatening the lives of their crew is considered a dangerous development,” according to the statement that was carried by state news agency WAM.

      The statement, which did not identify the vessels beyond saying they were of various nationalities, said the incident did not result in spills. The UAE did not blame any country or other party for the operation.

      Regional tensions have increased, with Washington saying it was sending a U.S. aircraft carrier and other forces to the Middle East due to what it said were Iranian threats, while Tehran has called the U.S. military presence “a target” rather than a threat.

      The U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet told Reuters it was aware of the UAE report but referred queries to the UAE authorities.

    • Un état antérieur de la dépêche (cf. chronologie relative) disparu depuis indiquait :
      UPDATE 1-UAE emirate of Fujairah denies media reports about blasts at Fujairah port

      cf. l’url du 3ème des liens ci-dessus :
      https://www.reuters.com/article/emirates-fujairah-port-shipping/update-1-uae-emirate-of-fujairah-denies-media-reports-about-blasts-at-fujai

    • État actuel de la dépêche (7h09), complétée par :

      Saudi Arabia says two Saudi oil tankers attacked near UAE waters - Reuters
      https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-oil-tankers-fujairah-idUSKCN1SJ088

      Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said in a statement that one of the two Saudi vessels attacked was on its way to be loaded with Saudi crude from Ras Tanura port for delivery to state-owned Saudi Aramco’s customers in the United States.

      The attack did not lead to any casualties or an oil spill but caused significant damage to the structures of the two vessels, said the statement carried on state news agency SPA.

      Trading and shipping sources identified the Saudi vessels as Bahri-owned very large crude carrier (VLCC) tanker Amjad and crude tanker Al Marzoqah. National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia (Bahri) did not respond to a request for comment.

      Falih said the attack aimed to undermine maritime freedom and “security of oil supplies to consumers all over the world”.

      The international community has a joint responsibility to protect the safety of maritime navigation and the security of oil tankers, to mitigate against the adverse consequences of such incidents on energy markets and the danger they pose to the global economy,” he said.

      The U.S. Maritime Administration said in an advisory on Sunday that the incidents off Fujairah, one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, have not been confirmed and urged caution when transiting the area. It said “the precise means of attack or sabotage is unknown”.

      On est sûr de rien, mais faites gaffe !

    • Amjad, à l’ancre à lège depuis le 2 mai, après un voyage Tianjin (11/04) - Fujairah (02/05)
      (indiqué par l’infobulle)

      Al Marzoqah, à l’ancre à lège, un peu plus au sud, après un voyage Yanbu (25/04) - Fujairah (07/05)
      (à la latitude de Global Project, à côté du navire bleu faisant route au nord)

      On notera qu’il y a pas mal de monde à l’ancre, en attente de chargement (les navires représentés par des marques rondes, les rouges sont des pétroliers)

      copie d’écran MarineTraffic

    • Explosions dans le port ? qui «  fonctionne normalement  » ?

      What happened in Fujairah ? Were there explosions and fire ? – Maritime Bulletin
      https://maritimebulletin.net/2019/05/12/what-happened-in-fujairah-were-there-explosions-and-fire

      Contradictory and confusing news on a very major accident in Fujairah, UAE, Gulf of Oman, started to circulate since afternoon May 12, claiming that there were several explosions in Fujairah port area, and that as a result, at least seven tankers were set on fire. UAE officials condemned these rumors as “fake news”, insisting that nothing happened, and that the port is working without any accidents of any kind, let alone series of explosions and fires.

      Later though, UAE admits there were accidents, describing them as “acts of sabotage”. In the evening UAE media Emirates News Agency published official press-release:

      ABU DHABI, 12th May, 2019 (WAM) — Four commercial ships were subjected to sabotage operations today, 12th May, near UAE territorial waters in the Gulf of Oman, east of Fujairah, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, MOFAIC, has announced.
      The Ministry said that the concerned authorities have taken all necessary measures, and are investigating the incident in cooperation with local and international bodies.
      It said that there had been no injuries or fatalities on board the vessels and that there had been no spillage of harmful chemicals or fuel.

      http://wam.ae/en/details/1395302762084

      Iranian PRESS TV claimed it identified tankers hit by explosions:
      Despite the UAE government’s denial, witnesses have emphasized that the blasts have taken place and some media sources have even went further, identifying a number of oil tankers hit by the explosions by their hull numbers as follows:
      Crude oil tanker AMJAD, IMO 9779800, dwt 300000, built 2017, flag Saudi Arabia.
      Crude oil tanker AL MARZOQAH, IMO 9165762, dwt 105084, built 1999, flag Saudi Arabia.
      Product tanker MIRAJ, IMO 9394741, dwt 7414, built 2007, flag Dominica.
      Product tanker A MICHEL, IMO 9177674, dwt 6711, built 2007, flag UAE..
      Product tanker FNSA 10, IMO 9432074, dwt 6453, built 2007, flag UAE.
      https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/05/12/595783/UAE-fujairah-sabotage-vessel

      Among allegedly struck tankers are one VLCC, one Aframax and three small tankers, most probably bunkering tankers.

      What happened exactly, how bad were explosions and fire, if there were any, and what definition “act of sabotage” means, how much true is indeed, the whole story, is so far anyone’s guess.

      At least three of abovementioned tankers, including VLCC and Aframax, are on the AIS, live, no interruptions. There are no auxiliary, or rescue, or fire, boats near them.

      Apparently, if there were “acts of sabotage” on or near at least three tankers listed above, first of all VLCC and Aframax, it didn’t happen in port, but on outer anchorage, so news on port being on fire, immersed in dense smoke, can be considered as fake news.

    • Plus tôt, Al Mayadeen, repris par Sputnik, annonçaient des explosions dans le port et la mention de survol d’avions français et états-uniens,…

      Des médias annoncent une série d’explosions dans un port émirati, les autorités démentent - Sputnik France
      https://fr.sputniknews.com/international/201905121041082126-port-emirati-fujairah-explosions-petroliers-feu

      Selon la chaîne de télévision al-Mayadeen, qui se réfère à des médias locaux, une série d’explosions a retenti ce dimanche 12 mai dans un port émirati de Fujaïrah. Le porte-parole des autorités locales a pourtant démenti ces informations, en affirmant que le port fonctionnait normalement.

      Plusieurs explosions puissantes ont retenti ce dimanche matin 12 mai dans le port de Fujairah, aux Émirats Arabes Unis, a annoncé la chaîne de télévision al-Mayadeen en se référant à des médias locaux. De sept à dix pétroliers seraient embrasés.

      Selon l’agence Mehr, des explosions se sont produites dans le port de Fujaïrah entre 4 et 7 heures du matin.

      Selon des témoins cités par le média, des avions de guerre américains et français survolaient le port au moment des explosions.

      Néanmoins, le porte-parole des autorités locales a démenti les informations diffusées par les médias qui faisaient état de plusieurs explosions.

      Puis Sputnik reprenait le communiqué des EAU

      Les Émirats informent que 4 bateaux ont été victimes de sabotage près de leurs côtes - Sputnik France
      https://fr.sputniknews.com/international/201905121041092056-emirats-arabes-unis-sabotage-bateaux

      Quatre navires de commerce ont été visés par des « opérations de sabotage » près des eaux territoriales des Émirats arabes unis, annonce la diplomatie du pays précisant qu’il n’y a pas eu de victimes.
      […]
      Plus tôt dans la journée, la chaîne de télévision al-Mayadeen a fait état de plusieurs explosions puissantes dans le port. Selon l’agence Mehr, des explosions se sont produites entre 4 et 7 heures du matin. Citant des témoins, le média a en outre affirmé que des avions de guerre américains et français survolaient le port au moment des explosions. Par la suite, le service de presse du gouvernement de l’émirat de Fujaïrah a démenti ces informations.

    • https://www.presstv.com/DetailFr/2019/05/13/595812/ptroliers-iran-golfe-persique-brut-bourse-mirats-arabes-unis-explosion

      La diplomatie iranienne a jugé inquiétant et regrettable l’incident survenu au port de Fujaïra aux EAU sur lequel elle demande l’ouverture d’une enquête.

      Le porte-parole de la diplomatie iranienne a demandé qu’on fasse toute la lumière sur les explosions qui se sont produites, dimanche 12 mai, à l’intérieur du port de Fujaïrah des Émirats arabes unis et qui ont détruit sept à dix pétroliers.

    • Actes de « sabotage » contre des navires de commerce au large des Emirats
      Reuters13 mai 2019 (Maher Chmaytelli et Alexander Cornwell, avec Rania El Gamal à Dubaï et Babak Dehghanpisheh à Genève ; Henri-Pierre André et Jean Terzian pour le service français)
      https://fr.news.yahoo.com/actes-sabotage-contre-des-navires-commerce-au-large-044507526.html

      (...) Dans un communiqué transmis par l’agence de presse officielle saoudienne SPA, Khalid al-Falih a indiqué que cette attaque n’avait fait aucune victime ni provoqué de déversement de pétrole. Des dommages importants ont été causés à la structure de l’un des deux navires, a-t-il précisé.

      Les Emirats n’ont fourni aucun détail sur la nature de ces actes de sabotage ni sur le pavillon des bâtiments visés. On ne dispose à ce stade d’aucune information sur les auteurs des ces « sabotages ». Aucune précision n’a pu être obtenue auprès du commandement de la Ve Flotte américaine, basée au Bahreïn.

      « Soumettre des navires de commerce à des opérations de sabotage et menacer les vies des équipages est un développement dangereux », déclarait le ministère émirati dans un communiqué repris dimanche par l’agence officielle de presse WAM.

      L’incident est survenu dans une phase d’escalade des tensions dans cette région du Golfe, où l’armée américaine a déployé des moyens militaires supplémentaires face à ce que Washington qualifie de menace iranienne.

      Sur Twitter, le député iranien Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, qui préside la commission parlementaire de la Sécurité nationale, a estimé que ces explosions démontraient que la sécurité des Etats du Golfe est aussi fragile que « du verre ».

    • Bon, pas beaucoup de nouvelles précisions, mais quand même deux vidéos tournées sur place aujourd’hui dont il ressort clairement, surtout de la première, qu’il s’est bien produit quelque chose qui ressemble à des attaques. «  Sabotage  » ne semble pas du tout adapté. Ce sont des reportages de RT en arabe (à 18h aujourd’hui) et de Sky News en arabe.

      What happened in Fujairah ? Were there explosions and fire ? May 13 VIDEOS – Maritime Bulletin
      (version mise à jour par rapport à ce matin cf. supra)
      https://maritimebulletin.net/2019/05/12/what-happened-in-fujairah-were-there-explosions-and-fire

      Video showing damaged, listed tanker A MICHELL, and Norwegian tanker ANDREA VICTORY stern hull breach.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxPjdMaRJP4

      On y parle de 4 navires (je ne comprends que quelques bribes)
      Le A Michell avec une légère gîte sur tribord et le Andrea Victory avec une nette perforation de son tableau arrière, le choc ayant provoqué le décrochement du O du nom du navire… À 2’00" on entrevoie la poupe d’un navire sous pavillon des ÉAU dont on ne peut distinguer le nom, masqué sous le bandeau et qui arbore à une drisse le pavillon Bravo (drapeau rouge) indiquant qu’il charge ou décharge des matières dangereuses, apparemment sur rade et non à quai à l’aide probablement du navire voisin qu’on entrevoit sur la droite

      Dans la 2ème vidéo, le reporter est filmé devant la proue du Al Marzoqah dont le flanc bâbord porte des traces de choc ou d’éraflure dont l’article suppose qu’elles peuvent résulter de l’attaque. On ne voit malheureusement aucun autre point de vue.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHeijlXM3uI

      (note pour @gonzo, l’accent du reporter me paraît nettement plus compréhensible, en tous cas, j’en comprends un tout petit plus que dans la première)

    • Ici CBS News, reprenant les images du Al Marzoqah par Sky News, parle d’une explosion l’ayant endommagé sans traces apparentes et mentionne un autre navire attaqué par un objet flottant, ce qui correspond très exactement à ce que l’on peut voir du A Michell dans la vidéo de RT.

      CBS News parlent aussi de méchants ill wishers, sans autre précision…

      Iran news : « Sabotage attacks » on Saudi Arabia oil tankers near Fujairah port in UAE stoke fear of US-Iran conflict today - Live Updates - CBS News
      https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-news-saudi-arabia-sabotage-oil-tankers-fujairah-uae-fears-us-iran-conf

      (pas de lien externe vers la vidéo)

  • Who Was Shakespeare? Could the Author Have Been a Woman? - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/who-is-shakespeare-emilia-bassano/588076

    On a spring night in 2018, I stood on a Manhattan sidewalk with friends, reading Shakespeare aloud. We were in line to see an adaptation of Macbeth and had decided to pass the time refreshing our memories of the play’s best lines. I pulled up Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy on my iPhone. “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,” I read, thrilled once again by the incantatory power of the verse. I remembered where I was when I first heard those lines: in my 10th-grade English class, startled out of my adolescent stupor by this woman rebelling magnificently and malevolently against her submissive status. “Make thick my blood, / Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse.” Six months into the #MeToo movement, her fury and frustration felt newly resonant.

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    Pulled back into plays I’d studied in college and graduate school, I found myself mesmerized by Lady Macbeth and her sisters in the Shakespeare canon. Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing, raging at the limitations of her sex (“O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace”). Rosalind, in As You Like It, affecting the swagger of masculine confidence to escape those limitations (“We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside, / As many other mannish cowards have / That do outface it with their semblances”). Isabella, in Measure for Measure, fearing no one will believe her word against Angelo’s, rapist though he is (“To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?”). Kate, in The Taming of the Shrew, refusing to be silenced by her husband (“My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, / Or else my heart concealing it will break”). Emilia, in one of her last speeches in Othello before Iago kills her, arguing for women’s equality (“Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them”).
    I was reminded of all the remarkable female friendships, too: Beatrice and Hero’s allegiance; Emilia’s devotion to her mistress, Desdemona; Paulina’s brave loyalty to Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; and plenty more. (“Let’s consult together against this greasy knight,” resolve the merry wives of Windsor, revenging themselves on Falstaff.) These intimate female alliances are fresh inventions—they don’t exist in the literary sources from which many of the plays are drawn. And when the plays lean on historical sources (Plutarch, for instance), they feminize them, portraying legendary male figures through the eyes of mothers, wives, and lovers. “Why was Shakespeare able to see the woman’s position, write entirely as if he were a woman, in a way that none of the other playwrights of the age were able to?” In her book about the plays’ female characters, Tina Packer, the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, asked the question very much on my mind.

    Doubts about whether William Shakespeare (who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died in 1616) really wrote the works attributed to him are almost as old as the writing itself. Alternative contenders—Francis Bacon; Christopher Marlowe; and Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, prominent among them—continue to have champions, whose fervor can sometimes border on fanaticism. In response, orthodox Shakespeare scholars have settled into dogmatism of their own. Even to dabble in authorship questions is considered a sign of bad faith, a blinkered failure to countenance genius in a glover’s son. The time had come, I felt, to tug at the blinkers of both camps and reconsider the authorship debate: Had anyone ever proposed that the creator of those extraordinary women might be a woman? Each of the male possibilities requires an elaborate theory to explain his use of another’s name. None of the candidates has succeeded in dethroning the man from Stratford. Yet a simple reason would explain a playwright’s need for a pseudonym in Elizabethan England: being female.
    Who was this woman writing “immortal work” in the same year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print?

    Long before Tina Packer marveled at the bard’s uncanny insight, others were no less awed by the empathy that pervades the work. “One would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman,” wrote Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century philosopher and playwright. The critic John Ruskin said, “Shakespeare has no heroes—he has only heroines.” A striking number of those heroines refuse to obey rules. At least 10 defy their fathers, bucking betrothals they don’t like to find their own paths to love. Eight disguise themselves as men, outwitting patriarchal controls—more gender-swapping than can be found in the work of any previous English playwright. Six lead armies.

    The prevailing view, however, has been that no women in Renaissance England wrote for the theater, because that was against the rules. Religious verse and translation were deemed suitable female literary pursuits; “closet dramas,” meant only for private reading, were acceptable. The stage was off-limits. Yet scholars have lately established that women were involved in the business of acting companies as patrons, shareholders, suppliers of costumes, and gatherers of entrance fees. What’s more, 80 percent of the plays printed in the 1580s were written anonymously, and that number didn’t fall below 50 percent until the early 1600s. At least one eminent Shakespeare scholar, Phyllis Rackin, of the University of Pennsylvania, challenges the blanket assumption that the commercial drama pouring forth in the period bore no trace of a female hand. So did Virginia Woolf, even as she sighed over the obstacles that would have confronted a female Shakespeare: “Undoubtedly, I thought, looking at the shelf where there are no plays by women, her work would have gone unsigned.”

    A tantalizing nudge lies buried in the writings of Gabriel Harvey, a well-known Elizabethan literary critic. In 1593, he referred cryptically to an “excellent Gentlewoman” who had written three sonnets and a comedy. “I dare not Particularise her Description,” he wrote, even as he heaped praise on her.

    All her conceits are illuminate with the light of Reason; all her speeches beautified with the grace of Affability … In her mind there appeareth a certain heavenly Logic; in her tongue & pen a divine Rhetoric … I dare undertake with warrant, whatsoever she writeth must needs remain an immortal work, and will leave, in the activest world, an eternal memory of the silliest vermin that she should vouchsafe to grace with her beautiful and allective style, as ingenious as elegant.

    Who was this woman writing “immortal work” in the same year that Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print, on the poem “Venus and Adonis,” a scandalous parody of masculine seduction tales (in which the woman forces herself on the man)? Harvey’s tribute is extraordinary, yet orthodox Shakespeareans and anti-Stratfordians alike have almost entirely ignored it.

    Until recently, that is, when a few bold outliers began to advance the case that Shakespeare might well have been a woman. One candidate is Mary Sidney, the countess of Pembroke (and beloved sister of the celebrated poet Philip Sidney)—one of the most educated women of her time, a translator and poet, and the doyenne of the Wilton Circle, a literary salon dedicated to galvanizing an English cultural renaissance. Clues beckon, not least that Sidney and her husband were the patrons of one of the first theater companies to perform Shakespeare’s plays. Was Shakespeare’s name useful camouflage, allowing her to publish what she otherwise couldn’t?
    Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer.

    But the candidate who intrigued me more was a woman as exotic and peripheral as Sidney was pedigreed and prominent. Not long after my Macbeth outing, I learned that Shakespeare’s Globe, in London, had set out to explore this figure’s input to the canon. The theater’s summer 2018 season concluded with a new play, Emilia, about a contemporary of Shakespeare’s named Emilia Bassano. Born in London in 1569 to a family of Venetian immigrants—musicians and instrument-makers who were likely Jewish—she was one of the first women in England to publish a volume of poetry (suitably religious yet startlingly feminist, arguing for women’s “Libertie” and against male oppression). Her existence was unearthed in 1973 by the Oxford historian A. L. Rowse, who speculated that she was Shakespeare’s mistress, the “dark lady” described in the sonnets. In Emilia, the playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm goes a step further: Her Shakespeare is a plagiarist who uses Bassano’s words for Emilia’s famous defense of women in Othello.

    Could Bassano have contributed even more widely and directly? The idea felt like a feminist fantasy about the past—but then, stories about women’s lost and obscured achievements so often have a dreamlike quality, unveiling a history different from the one we’ve learned. Was I getting carried away, reinventing Shakespeare in the image of our age? Or was I seeing past gendered assumptions to the woman who—like Shakespeare’s heroines—had fashioned herself a clever disguise? Perhaps the time was finally ripe for us to see her.

    The ranks of Shakespeare skeptics comprise a kind of literary underworld—a cross-disciplinary array of academics, actors (Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance are perhaps the best known), writers, teachers, lawyers, a few Supreme Court justices (Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens). Look further back and you’ll find such illustrious names as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Helen Keller, and Charlie Chaplin. Their ideas about the authorship of the plays and poems differ, but they concur that Shakespeare is not the man who wrote them.

    Their doubt is rooted in an empirical conundrum. Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented, by the standards of the period—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer. The more than 70 documents that exist show him as an actor, a shareholder in a theater company, a moneylender, and a property investor. They show that he dodged taxes, was fined for hoarding grain during a shortage, pursued petty lawsuits, and was subject to a restraining order. The profile is remarkably coherent, adding up to a mercenary impresario of the Renaissance entertainment industry. What’s missing is any sign that he wrote.

    From January 1863: Nathaniel Hawthorne considers authorship while visiting Stratford-upon-Avon

    No such void exists for other major writers of the period, as a meticulous scholar named Diana Price has demonstrated. Many left fewer documents than Shakespeare did, but among them are manuscripts, letters, and payment records proving that writing was their profession. For example, court records show payment to Ben Jonson for “those services of his wit & pen.” Desperate to come up with comparable material to round out Shakespeare, scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries forged evidence—later debunked—of a writerly life.

    To be sure, Shakespeare’s name can be found linked, during his lifetime, to written works. With Love’s Labour’s Lost, in 1598, it started appearing on the title pages of one-play editions called “quartos.” (Several of the plays attributed to Shakespeare were first published anonymously.) Commentators at the time saluted him by name, praising “Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase” and “honey-tongued Shakespeare.” But such evidence proves attribution, not actual authorship—as even some orthodox Shakespeare scholars grant. “I would love to find a contemporary document that said William Shakespeare was the dramatist of Stratford-upon-Avon written during his lifetime,” Stanley Wells, a professor emeritus at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, has said. “That would shut the buggers up!”
    FROM THE ARCHIVES
    October 1991 Atlantic cover

    In 1991, The Atlantic commissioned two pieces from admittedly partisan authors, Irving Matus and Tom Bethell, to examine and debate the argument:
    In Defense of Shakespeare
    The Case for Oxford

    By contrast, more than a few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are on record suggesting that his name got affixed to work that wasn’t his. In 1591, the dramatist Robert Greene wrote of the practice of “underhand brokery”—of poets who “get some other Batillus to set his name to their verses.” (Batillus was a mediocre Roman poet who claimed some of Virgil’s verses as his own.) The following year, he warned fellow playwrights about an “upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,” who thinks he is the “onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” Most scholars agree that the “Crow” is Shakespeare, then an actor in his late 20s, and conclude that the new-hatched playwright was starting to irk established figures. Anti-Stratfordians see something else: In Aesop’s fables, the crow was a proud strutter who stole the feathers of others; Horace’s crow, in his epistles, was a plagiarist. Shakespeare was being attacked, they say, not as a budding dramatist, but as a paymaster taking credit for others’ work. “Seeke you better Maisters,” Greene advised, urging his colleagues to cease writing for the Crow.

    Ben Jonson, among others, got in his digs, too. Scholars agree that the character of Sogliardo in Every Man Out of His Humour—a country bumpkin “without brain, wit, anything, indeed, ramping to gentility”—is a parody of Shakespeare, a social climber whose pursuit of a coat of arms was common lore among his circle of actors. In a satirical poem called “On Poet-Ape,” Jonson was likely taking aim at Shakespeare the theater-world wheeler-dealer. This poet-ape, Jonson wrote, “from brokage is become so bold a thief,”

    At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
    Buy the reversion of old plays; now grown
    To a little wealth, and credit in the scene,
    He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own

    What to make of the fact that Jonson changed his tune in the prefatory material that he contributed to the First Folio of plays when it appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death? Jonson’s praise there did more than attribute the work to Shakespeare. It declared his art unmatched: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” The anti-Stratfordian response is to note the shameless hype at the heart of the Folio project. “Whatever you do, Buy,” the compilers urged in their dedication, intent on a hard sell for a dramatist who, doubters emphasize, was curiously unsung at his death. The Folio’s introductory effusions, they argue, contain double meanings. Jonson tells readers, for example, to find Shakespeare not in his portrait “but his Booke,” seeming to undercut the relation between the man and the work. And near the start of his over-the-top tribute, Jonson riffs on the unreliability of extravagant praise, “which doth ne’er advance / The truth.”

    From September 1904: Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrates Shakespeare

    The authorship puzzles don’t end there. How did the man born in Stratford acquire the wide-ranging knowledge on display in the plays—of the Elizabethan court, as well as of multiple languages, the law, astronomy, music, the military, and foreign lands, especially northern Italian cities? The author’s linguistic brilliance shines in words and sayings imported from foreign vocabularies, but Shakespeare wasn’t educated past the age of 13. Perhaps he traveled, joined the army, worked as a tutor, or all three, scholars have proposed. Yet no proof exists of any of those experiences, despite, as the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out in an essay, “the greatest battery of organized research that has ever been directed upon a single person.”
    Emilia Bassano’s life encompassed the breadth of the Shakespeare canon: its low-class references and knowledge of the court; its Italian sources and Jewish allusions; its music and feminism.

    In fact, a document that does exist—Shakespeare’s will—would seem to undercut such hypotheses. A wealthy man when he retired to Stratford, he was meticulous about bequeathing his properties and possessions (his silver, his second-best bed). Yet he left behind not a single book, though the plays draw on hundreds of texts, including some—in Italian and French—that hadn’t yet been translated into English. Nor did he leave any musical instruments, though the plays use at least 300 musical terms and refer to 26 instruments. He remembered three actor-owners in his company, but no one in the literary profession. Strangest of all, he made no mention of manuscripts or writing. Perhaps as startling as the gaps in his will, Shakespeare appears to have neglected his daughters’ education—an incongruity, given the erudition of so many of the playwright’s female characters. One signed with her mark, the other with a signature a scholar has called “painfully formed.”

    “Weak and unconvincing” was Trevor-Roper’s verdict on the case for Shakespeare. My delving left me in agreement, not that the briefs for the male alternatives struck me as compelling either. Steeped in the plays, I felt their author would surely join me in bridling at the Stratfordians’ unquestioning worship at the shrine—their arrogant dismissal of skeptics as mere deluded “buggers,” or worse. (“Is there any more fanatic zealot than the priest-like defender of a challenged creed?” asked Richmond Crinkley, a former director of programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library who was nonetheless sympathetic to the anti-Stratfordian view.) To appreciate how belief blossoms into fact—how readily myths about someone get disseminated as truth—one can’t do better than to read Shakespeare. Just think of how obsessed the work is with mistaken identities, concealed women, forged and anonymous documents—with the error of trusting in outward appearances. What if searchers for the real Shakespeare simply haven’t set their sights on the right pool of candidates?

    Read: An interview with the author of ‘The Shakespeare Wars’

    I met Emilia Bassano’s most ardent champion at Alice’s Tea Cup, which seemed unexpectedly apt: A teahouse on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it has quotes from Alice in Wonderland scrawled across the walls. (“off with their heads!”) John Hudson, an Englishman in his 60s who pursued a degree at the Shakespeare Institute in a mid-career swerve, had been on the Bassano case for years, he told me. In 2014, he published Shakespeare’s Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier, the Woman Behind Shakespeare’s Plays? His zeal can sometimes get the better of him, yet he emphasizes that his methods and findings are laid out “for anyone … to refute if they wish.” Like Alice’s rabbit hole, Bassano’s case opened up new and richly disorienting perspectives—on the plays, on the ways we think about genius and gender, and on a fascinating life.

    Hudson first learned of Bassano from A. L. Rowse, who discovered mention of her in the notebooks of an Elizabethan physician and astrologer named Simon Forman. In her teens, she became the mistress of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the master of court entertainment and patron of Shakespeare’s acting company. And that is only the start. Whether or not Bassano was Shakespeare’s lover (scholars now dismiss Rowse’s claim), the discernible contours of her biography supply what the available material about Shakespeare’s life doesn’t: circumstantial evidence of opportunities to acquire an impressive expanse of knowledge.

    Bassano lived, Hudson points out, “an existence on the boundaries of many different social worlds,” encompassing the breadth of the Shakespeare canon: its coarse, low-class references and its intimate knowledge of the court; its Italian sources and its Jewish allusions; its music and its feminism. And her imprint, as Hudson reads the plays, extends over a long period. He notes the many uses of her name, citing several early on—for instance, an Emilia in The Comedy of Errors. (Emilia, the most common female name in the plays alongside Katherine, wasn’t used in the 16th century by any other English playwright.) Titus Andronicus features a character named Bassianus, which was the original Roman name of Bassano del Grappa, her family’s hometown before their move to Venice. Later, in The Merchant of Venice, the romantic hero is a Venetian named Bassanio, an indication that the author perhaps knew of the Bassanos’ connection to Venice. (Bassanio is a spelling of their name in some records.)

    Further on, in Othello, another Emilia appears—Iago’s wife. Her famous speech against abusive husbands, Hudson notes, doesn’t show up until 1623, in the First Folio, included among lines that hadn’t appeared in an earlier version (lines that Stratfordians assume—without any proof—were written before Shakespeare’s death). Bassano was still alive, and by then had known her share of hardship at the hands of men. More to the point, she had already spoken out, in her 1611 book of poetry, against men who “do like vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred.”

    Prodded by Hudson, you can discern traces of Bassano’s own life trajectory in particular works across the canon. In All’s Well That Ends Well, a lowborn girl lives with a dowager countess and a general named Bertram. When Bassano’s father, Baptista, died in 1576, Emilia, then 7, was taken in by Susan Bertie, the dowager countess of Kent. The countess’s brother, Peregrine Bertie, was—like the fictional Bertram—a celebrated general. In the play, the countess tells how a father “famous … in his profession” left “his sole child … bequeathed to my overlooking. I have those hopes of her good that her education promises.” Bassano received a remarkable humanist education with the countess. In her book of poetry, she praised her guardian as “the Mistris of my youth, / The noble guide of my ungovern’d dayes.”
    Bassano’s life sheds possible light on the plays’ preoccupation with women caught in forced or loveless marriages.

    As for the celebrated general, Hudson seizes on the possibility that Bassano’s ears, and perhaps eyes, were opened by Peregrine Bertie as well. In 1582, Bertie was named ambassador to Denmark by the queen and sent to the court at Elsinore—the setting of Hamlet. Records show that the trip included state dinners with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose names appear in the play. Because emissaries from the same two families later visited the English court, the trip isn’t decisive, but another encounter is telling: Bertie met with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose astronomical theories influenced the play. Was Bassano (then just entering her teens) on the trip? Bertie was accompanied by a “whole traine,” but only the names of important gentlemen are recorded. In any case, Hudson argues, she would have heard tales on his return.

    Later, as the mistress of Henry Carey (43 years her senior), Bassano gained access to more than the theater world. Carey, the queen’s cousin, held various legal and military positions. Bassano was “favoured much of her Majesty and of many noblemen,” the physician Forman noted, indicating the kind of extensive aristocratic associations that only vague guesswork can accord to Shakespeare. His company didn’t perform at court until Christmas of 1594, after several of the plays informed by courtly life had already been written. Shakespeare’s history plays, concerned as they are with the interactions of the governing class, presume an insider perspective on aristocratic life. Yet mere court performances wouldn’t have enabled such familiarity, and no trace exists of Shakespeare’s presence in any upper-class household.

    And then, in late 1592, Bassano (now 23) was expelled from court. She was pregnant. Carey gave her money and jewels and, for appearance’s sake, married her off to Alphonso Lanier, a court musician. A few months later, she had a son. Despite the glittering dowry, Lanier must not have been pleased. “Her husband hath dealt hardly with her,” Forman wrote, “and spent and consumed her goods.”

    Bassano was later employed in a noble household, probably as a music tutor, and roughly a decade after that opened a school. Whether she accompanied her male relatives—whose consort of recorder players at the English court lasted 90 years—on their trips back to northern Italy isn’t known. But the family link to the home country offers support for the fine-grained familiarity with the region that (along with in-depth musical knowledge) any plausible candidate for authorship would seem to need—just what scholars have had to strain to establish for Shakespeare. (Perhaps, theories go, he chatted with travelers or consulted books.) In Othello, for example, Iago gives a speech that precisely describes a fresco in Bassano del Grappa—also the location of a shop owned by Giovanni Otello, a likely source of the title character’s name.

    Her Bassano lineage—scholars suggest the family were conversos, converted or hidden Jews presenting as Christians—also helps account for the Jewish references that scholars of the plays have noted. The plea in The Merchant of Venice for the equality and humanity of Jews, a radical departure from typical anti-Semitic portrayals of the period, is well known. “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” Shylock asks. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” A Midsummer Night’s Dream draws from a passage in the Talmud about marriage vows; spoken Hebrew is mixed into the nonsense language of All’s Well That Ends Well.
    Stephen Doyle

    What’s more, the Bassano family’s background suggests a source close to home for the particular interest in dark figures in the sonnets, Othello, and elsewhere. A 1584 document about the arrest of two Bassano men records them as “black”—among Elizabethans, the term could apply to anyone darker than the fair-skinned English, including those with a Mediterranean complexion. (The fellows uttered lines that could come straight from a comic interlude in the plays: “We have as good friends in the court as thou hast and better too … Send us to ward? Thou wert as good kiss our arse.”) In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the noblemen derisively compare Rosaline, the princess’s attendant, to “chimney-sweepers” and “colliers” (coal miners). The king joins in, telling Berowne, who is infatuated with her, “Thy love is black as ebony,” to which the young lord responds, “O wood divine!”

    Bassano’s life sheds possible light, too, on another outsider theme: the plays’ preoccupation with women caught in forced or loveless marriages. Hudson sees her misery reflected in the sonnets, thought to have been written from the early 1590s to the early 1600s. “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state, /And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, /And look upon myself and curse my fate,” reads sonnet 29. (When Maya Angelou first encountered the poem as a child, she thought Shakespeare must have been a black girl who had been sexually abused: “How else could he know what I know?”) For Shakespeare, those years brought a rise in status: In 1596, he was granted a coat of arms, and by 1597, he was rich enough to buy the second-largest house in Stratford.

    Read: What Maya Angelou meant when she said ‘Shakespeare must be a black girl’

    In what is considered an early or muddled version of The Taming of the Shrew, a man named Alphonso (as was Bassano’s husband) tries to marry off his three daughters, Emilia, Kate, and Philema. Emilia drops out in the later version, and the father is now called Baptista (the name of Bassano’s father). As a portrait of a husband dealing “hardly” with a wife, the play is horrifying. Yet Kate’s speech of submission, with its allusions to the Letters of Paul, is slippery: Even as she exaggeratedly parrots the Christian doctrine of womanly subjection, she is anything but dutifully silent.

    Shakespeare’s women repeatedly subvert such teachings, perhaps most radically in The Winter’s Tale, another drama of male cruelty. There the noblewoman Paulina, scorned by King Leontes as “a most intelligencing bawd” with a “boundless tongue,” bears fierce witness against him (no man dares to) when he wrongly accuses Queen Hermione of adultery and imprisons her. As in so many of the comedies, a more enlightened society emerges in the end because the women’s values triumph.

    I was stunned to realize that the year The Winter’s Tale was likely completed, 1611, was the same year Bassano published her book of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. Her writing style bears no obvious resemblance to Shakespeare’s in his plays, though Hudson strains to suggest similarities. The overlap lies in the feminist content. Bassano’s poetry registers as more than conventional religious verse designed to win patronage (she dedicates it to nine women, Mary Sidney included, fashioning a female literary community). Scholars have observed that it reads as a “transgressive” defense of Eve and womankind. Like a cross-dressing Shakespearean heroine, Bassano refuses to play by the rules, heretically reinterpreting scripture. “If Eve did err, it was for knowledge sake,” she writes. Arguing that the crucifixion, a crime committed by men, was a greater crime than Eve’s, she challenges the basis of men’s “tyranny” over women.

    “I always feel something Italian, something Jewish about Shakespeare,” Jorge Luis Borges told The Paris Review in 1966. “Perhaps Englishmen admire him because of that, because it’s so unlike them.” Borges didn’t mention feeling “something female” about the bard, yet that response has never ceased to be part of Shakespeare’s allure—embodiment though he is of the patriarchal authority of the Western canon. What would the revelation of a woman’s hand at work mean, aside from the loss of a prime tourist attraction in Stratford-upon-Avon? Would the effect be a blow to the cultural patriarchy, or the erosion of the canon’s status? Would (male) myths of inexplicable genius take a hit? Would women at last claim their rightful authority as historical and intellectual forces?

    I was curious to take the temperature of the combative authorship debate as women edge their way into it. Over more tea, I tested Hudson’s room for flexibility. Could the plays’ many connections to Bassano be explained by simply assuming the playwright knew her well? “Shakespeare would have had to run to her every few minutes for a musical reference or an Italian pun,” he said. I caught up with Mark Rylance, the actor and former artistic director of the Globe, in the midst of rehearsals for Othello (whose plot, he noted, comes from an Italian text that didn’t exist in English). A latitudinarian doubter—embracing the inquiry, not any single candidate—Rylance has lately observed that the once heretical notion of collaboration between Shakespeare and other writers “is now accepted, pursued and published by leading orthodox scholars.” He told me that “Emilia should be studied by anyone interested in the creation of the plays.” David Scott Kastan, a well-known Shakespeare scholar at Yale, urged further exploration too, though he wasn’t ready to anoint her bard. “What’s clear is that it’s important to know more about her,” he said, and even got playful with pronouns: “The more we know about her and the world she lived in, the more we’ll know about Shakespeare, whoever she was.”
    Related Stories

    Such Ado: The Fight for Shakespeare’s Puns
    Shakespeare in Love, or in Context

    In the fall, I joined the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust—a gathering of skeptics at the Globe—feeling excited that gender would be at the top of the agenda. Some eyebrows were raised even in this company, but enthusiasm ran high. “People have been totally frustrated with authorship debates that go nowhere, but that’s because there have been 200 years of bad candidates,” one participant from the University of Toronto exclaimed. “They didn’t want to see women in this,” he reflected. “It’s a tragedy of history.”

    He favored Sidney. Others were eager to learn about Bassano, and with collaboration in mind, I wondered whether the two women had perhaps worked together, or as part of a group. I thought of Bassano’s Salve Deus, in which she writes that men have wrongly taken credit for knowledge: “Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke / From Eve’s faire hand, as from a learned Booke.”

    The night after the meeting, I went to a performance of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre. I sat enthralled, still listening for the poet in her words, trying to catch her reflection in some forgotten bit of verse. “Give me my robe, put on my crown,” cried the queen, “I have / Immortal longings in me.” There she was, kissing her ladies goodbye, raising the serpent to her breast. “I am fire and air.”

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=gEr9HYf8jG4

    Les autorités chinoises se servent d’une application mobile pour se livrer à une surveillance massive illégale et à la détention arbitraire de musulmans dans la région du Xinjiang, dans l’ouest du pays, selon un nouveau rapport de Human Right Watch publié aujourd’hui.

    « Pour la première fois, nos recherches démontrent que la police du Xinjiang recueille illégalement des informations sur des habitants même quand leurs activités sont tout à fait légales, afin de prendre des mesures contre certains d’entre eux », a déclaré Maya Wang, chercheuse senior sur la Chine auprès de la division Asie de Human Rights Watch. « Le gouvernement chinois surveille tous les aspects de la vie des habitants du Xinjiang, repère ceux dont le comportement lui semble suspect, et les guette de manière encore plus intense. »

    Au Xinjiang, les faits et gestes de tout un chacun sont scrutés par la plateforme IJOP. Elle surveille les mouvements de personnes en localisant leurs téléphones, véhicules et cartes d’identité. Elle surveille les consommations d’électricité et de carburant des habitants. Human Rights Watch a constaté que ce système et certains des points de contrôle dans la région sont synchronisés pour former une série de clôtures invisibles ou virtuelles. La liberté de circulation des personnes est limitée à divers degrés en fonction du degré de menace déterminé par les autorités grâce aux paramètres de l’application.

    Une semaine après la fin de sa détention arbitraire, un ancien résident du Xinjiang a déclaré à Human Rights Watch : « Je suis entré dans un centre commercial et une alarme orange s’est déclenchée. » La police est arrivée et l’a conduit au poste. « Je leur ai dit : “J’étais dans un centre de détention et vous m’avez remis en liberté parce que j’étais innocent” ».… La police m’a rétorqué : « Ne vous présentez pas dans des lieux publics » … J’ai dit : « Qu’est-ce que je vais faire maintenant ? Rester à la maison ? » Il m’a répondu : « Oui, c’est préférable, non ? »

  • Les anthropologues de l’Université d’Oxford ont découvert ce qu’ils considèrent être sept règles morales universelles.

    Les règles : aider votre famille, aider votre groupe, rendre les faveurs, être courageux, renvoyer aux supérieurs, répartir les ressources de manière équitable et respecter la propriété des autres, ont été trouvées dans une enquête de 60 cultures du monde entier.

    Des études antérieures ont examiné certaines de ces règles à certains endroits - mais aucune ne les a toutes examinées dans un grand échantillon représentatif de sociétés. La présente étude, publiée dans le volume 60, no. 1 numéro de Current Anthropology, d’Oliver Scott Curry, de Daniel Austin Mullins et de Harvey Whitehouse, est l’enquête interculturelle sur la morale la plus vaste et la plus complète jamais réalisée.

    L’équipe de l’Institut d’anthropologie cognitive et évolutive d’Oxford (...) a analysé les comptes rendus ethnographiques d’éthique de 60 sociétés, comprenant plus de 600 000 mots de plus de 600 sources.

    Oliver Scott Curry, auteur principal et chercheur principal à l’Institut d’anthropologie cognitive et évolutive, a déclaré : "Le débat entre les universalistes moraux et les relativistes moraux a fait rage depuis des siècles, mais nous avons maintenant des réponses à apporter. Comme prévu, ces sept règles morales semblent être universelles dans toutes les cultures. Tous partagent un code moral commun. Tous conviennent que coopérer, promouvoir le bien commun est la bonne chose à faire."

    L’étude a testé la théorie selon laquelle la moralité a évolué pour promouvoir la coopération et que, du fait qu’il existe de nombreux types de coopération, il existe de nombreux types de moralité.

    – Selon cette théorie de la « morale en tant que coopération », la sélection de la parenté explique pourquoi nous nous sentons tenus de prendre soin de nos familles et pourquoi nous avons horreur de l’inceste.
    – Le mutualisme explique pourquoi nous formons des groupes et des coalitions (il y a de la force et de la sécurité dans les nombres), et donc pourquoi nous valorisons l’unité, la solidarité et la loyauté.
    – L’échange social explique pourquoi nous faisons confiance aux autres, rendons service en échange, ressentons de la culpabilité et de la gratitude, faisons amende honorable et pardonnons.
    – Et la résolution des conflits explique pourquoi nous nous livrons à des démonstrations coûteuses de prouesses telles que le courage et la générosité, pourquoi nous nous en remettons à nos supérieurs, pourquoi nous divisons les ressources contestées équitablement et pourquoi nous reconnaissons la possession antérieure.

    La recherche a tout d’abord révélé que ces sept comportements coopératifs étaient toujours considérés comme moralement bons. Deuxièmement, des exemples de la plupart de ces mœurs ont été trouvés dans la plupart des sociétés. Point crucial, il n’existait aucun contre-exemple - aucune société dans laquelle aucun de ces comportements n’était considéré moralement mauvais. Et troisièmement, ces mœurs ont été observées avec une fréquence égale sur tous les continents ; ils n’étaient pas l’apanage exclusif de "l’Ouest" ni d’aucune autre région.

    Parmi les Amhara d’Éthiopie, "faire fi de l’obligation de parenté est considéré comme une déviation honteuse, indiquant un caractère pervers". En Corée, il existe une "éthique communautaire égalitaire [d’assistance] mutuelle et de coopération entre voisins [et] une forte solidarité au sein du groupe". "La réciprocité est observée à chaque étape de la vie des Garo [et] occupe une place très importante dans la structure sociale des valeurs des Garo." Parmi les Maasaï, "ceux qui s’accrochent aux vertus guerrières sont toujours très respectés" et "l’idéal sans compromis du guerrier suprême [implique] un engagement ascétique à se sacrifier ... au cœur de la bataille, comme une suprême démonstration de loyauté courageuse . " Les Bemba manifestent "un profond respect pour l’autorité des anciens". L ’"idée de justice" des Kapauku s’appelle "uta-uta, demi-moitié ... [dont le sens] se rapproche beaucoup de ce que nous appelons l’équité." Et chez les Tarahumara, "le respect de la propriété des autres est la clé de voûte de toutes les relations interpersonnelles".

    L’étude a également détecté une « variation sur un thème » - bien que toutes les sociétés semblaient s’accorder sur les sept règles morales de base, leur manière de les hiérarchiser ou de les hiérarchiser variait. L’équipe a maintenant mis au point un nouveau questionnaire sur les valeurs morales afin de recueillir des données sur les valeurs morales modernes. Elle examine également si la variation interculturelle des valeurs morales reflète la variation de la valeur de la coopération dans différentes conditions sociales.

    Selon son co-auteur, le professeur Harvey Whitehouse, les anthropologues sont particulièrement bien placés pour répondre aux questions de longue date concernant les universels moraux et le relativisme moral. "Notre étude était basée sur des descriptions historiques de cultures du monde entier ; ces données ont été recueillies avant et indépendamment de l’élaboration des théories que nous étions en train de tester. Les travaux futurs permettront de tester des prédictions plus précises du théorie en rassemblant de nouvelles données, encore plus systématiquement, sur le terrain ".

    "Nous espérons que ces recherches contribueront à promouvoir la compréhension mutuelle entre personnes de cultures différentes ; nous apprécierons ce que nous avons en commun et comment et pourquoi nous différons", a ajouté M. Curry.

    Is It Good to Cooperate?: Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies | Current Anthropology: Vol 60, No 1
    https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/701478

    Oliver Scott Curry, Daniel Austin Mullins, Harvey Whitehouse. Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies. Current Anthropology, 2019; 60 (1): 47 DOI: 10.1086/701478

    #Préhistoire #Anthropologie #Evolutionisme #Comparatisme

    • J’ai du mal à croire à celui ci : « répartir les ressources de manière équitable » à cause de la différence de valence des sexes (il semble que ces recherches aient fait l’impasse sur les femmes et les questions de genres) et aussi par le fait que ceci entre en contradiction avec celle ci : « renvoyer aux supérieurs » qui implique hiérarchisation et privilèges (c’est à dire répartition inéquitable des ressources). Dans la culture française par exemple on s’accommode très bien moralement d’une répartition inégale des ressources selon le mythe du mérite .

      Celui ci est assez étonnant aussi « respecter la propriété des autres » quant on sais que les femmes ont à peine 1% de la propriété terrienne sur terre. Et j’ai pas l’impression que la propriété même de leur propre corps soit respecté sur cette planète, vu que les femmes (et les enfants) sont considéré comme appartenant à des hommes dans la plus part des cultures dont j’ai connaissance, dont les cultures dérivantes de la bible.

      Pour l’interdit de l’inceste, c’est de le dénoncé et de le porter à la connaissance de la collectivité qui est interdit. C’est une notion à géométrie variable, il suffit de changer les règles de la famille pour que l’inceste devienne acceptable socialement (les familles nobles européennes en sont de bons exemples). C’est d’ailleurs pas un crime ni un délit dans le droit français. Ni dans la bible qui est très évasive dans la genèse à ce sujet.

      Ca me semble quant même très androcentré ces 7 règles, et peut être que ce texte respecte en fait la meta règle misogyne de faire comme si les femmes n’étaient pas vraiment humaines et ne parler que d’hommes à hommes.

      Les 7 sous règles des hommes sont en fait : « Aider votre famille à s’approprier les femmes et les enfants qu’elles portent , aider votre groupe masculin à dominer des autres , rendre les faveurs que vous reconnaissez comme tel entre hommes , être courageux selon des valeurs virilistes , renvoyer aux supérieurs de la hiérarchie patriarcale , répartir les ressources de manière équitable entre hommes et respecter la propriété des autres hommes , ont été trouvées dans une enquête de 60 cultures patriarcales du monde entier. »

      L’étude est signé par trois hommes, Oliver Scott Curry, Daniel Austin Mullins, Harvey Whitehouse ca explique peut être ce problème de #male_gaze

      Il y a je croi une faute dans le titre c’est « Current Andropology » qu’il fallait comprendre.

    • @aude_v Oui ça date un peu : Submitted : May 13, 2016
      Accepted : Dec 22, 2017, Online : Feb 08, 2019. Après, tout dépend sur quelles sociétés l’étude a été faite...

      @reka l’expression est « deferring to superiors ». Peut-on le traduire par « Rendre-compte aux supérieurs ? ».

      @mad_meg il est « normal » que ces règles soient androcentrées puisque les sociétés étudiées le sont. Ce ne sont pas des règles absolues (et d’ailleurs y en a-t-il ?).
      Ceci dit, je comprends ton point de vue. Une étude d’une femme sur la condition féminine dans ces sociétés aurait nuancé le résultat... ou pas : en effet, ton point de vue est daté de notre époque OU s’il ne l’est pas, cela voudrait dire que les femmes de cette société n’ont pas pu s’exprimer ce qu’il aurait fallu démontrer et ce que je ne peux faire en l’état actuel de mes connaissances en anthropologie/ethnographie de ces peuples (désolé).

    • il est « normal » que ces règles soient androcentrées puisque les sociétés étudiées le sont. Ce ne sont pas des règles absolues (et d’ailleurs y en a-t-il ?).

      Ce qui est pas « normal » c’est de pas le dire et prétendre que ces règles sont universelles alors qu’elles adoptent un point de vue sexiste et ne s’appliquent qu’à une minorité, et de ne même pas prendre la peine de mentionné cette spécificité.

    • Ce que tu dis est intéressant car il semblerait que cette inégalité soit quelque chose d’assimilée i.e. connue par les ethnologues, anthropologues et même archéologues et que par ce fait, elle ne fasse pas l’objet d’une mention particulière. Je prends pour argument le fait que les articles des publications scientifiques (sauf celles qui font état bien sûr d’une recherche sur le genre ou pour lesquelles le genre entre en ligne de compte) ne la mentionnent pas alors que les livres plus grand public peuvent le faire. J’en veux pour exemple « Naissance de la figure, l’art du Paléolithique à l’âge du Fer » de J.-P. Demoule, 2007 réed. 2017 que je relie actuellement et où il est mentionné p.67 : « (...) de même que toutes les sociétés humaines sont caractérisées par l’oppression, à des degrés variables, des femmes par les hommes ».

  • Les nouveautés de la May 2019 Update de Windows 10
    https://www.tomshardware.fr/les-nouveautes-de-la-may-2019-update-de-windows-10

    Comme de coutume depuis la sortie de l’OS en 2015, Microsoft sort une nouvelle édition de Windows 10 qui fourmille d’innovations et de corrections en tout genre. Le rythme de parution ces mises à jour est désormais établi à une par semestre. La toute nouvelle mise à jour de Windows 10 se nomme cette fois […]

    #actualites-du-site

  • » Updated: “Army Kills A Child, Injures 66 Palestinians, In Gaza
    IMEMC News - April 12, 2019 8:12 PM
    https://imemc.org/article/army-kills-a-child-injures-at-least-thirty-palestinians-in-gaza

    Israeli soldiers attacked, on Friday evening, the weekly Great March Processions in the besieged Gaza Strip, killing one child, and injuring at 55 others, including one who suffered serious wounds, and two medics.

    The Palestinian Health Ministry has reported that the soldiers shot a child, identified as Maisara Mousa Ali Abu Shallouf, 15, after shooting him with live fire in the abdomen, east of Jabalia, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.

    The soldiers also fired live rounds and gas bombs at medics trying to reach the child to provide him with the urgently needed medical help, before he succumbed to his wounds.

    Dr. Ashraf al-Qedra, the spokesperson of the Health Ministry In Gaza, said the soldiers shot 66 Palestinians, including 15 children and six women, in addition to two medics.

    It added that one of the wounded Palestinians suffered life-threatening wounds.

    The Health Ministry also stated that the soldiers shot two medics and caused others to suffer the effects of teargas inhalation.

    “““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““
    On 54th Friday of Great March of Return and Breaking Siege, Israeli Forces Kill Palestinian Child and Wound 93 Civilians, including 17 Children, 4 Women, 3 Paramedics, and Journalist
    April 12, 2019
    https://pchrgaza.org/en/?p=12310

    (...) The Israeli shooting, which continued at around 19:00, resulted in the killing of Maysara Mousa Suliman Abu Shalouf (15), from ‘zbit Beit Hanoun. At approximately 17:00, Maysara sustained a live bullet wound that entered his left waist and settled in the pelvis while standing few meters away from the border fence in eastern Jabalia. He was left bleeding for 20 minutes because medical personnel were unable to access him. After that, he was taken to a medical point and then referred to the Indonesian Hospital, where his death was declared at approximately 17:55.

    Moreover, 93 civilians, including 17 children, four women, three paramedics, and a journalist, were wounded. Forty-four of them were hit with live bullets and shrapnel, 46 were directly hit with tear gas canisters and three were hit with rubber bullets. In addition, dozens of civilians suffered tear gas inhalation and seizures due to tear gas canisters that were fired by the Israeli forces from the military jeeps and riffles in the eastern Gaza Strip.(...)

    #Palestine_assassinée #marcheduretour

  • 171 Swedish artists demand boycott of Eurovision in Israel
    April 4, 2019 11:14 A.M. (Updated: April 4, 2019 12:15 P.M.)
    http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=783095

    STOCKHOLM (Ma’an) — Some 171 Swedish artists and celebrities have signed an open letter urging to boycott the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest, in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Wednesday.

    In the open letter, the Swedish signatories said that "Just a few days after the Israeli victory in the Eurovision Song Contest in May 2018, Israel’s army killed 62 unarmed Palestinians who protested against their prison-like imprisonment in Gaza. Six of those murdered were children.”

    “““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““
    UK Band Release Song Highlighting Israeli Apartheid (VIDEO)
    April 4, 2019 5:36 AM IMEMC News & Agencies
    https://imemc.org/article/uk-band-release-song-highlighting-israeli-apartheid-video

    The UK-based band Slovo has released a new song which calls for a boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest final, which will be held in Tel Aviv on the 18th of May.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=227&v=ouibGAgONVQ


    #BDS

    • Wolf Alice engagé pour le concert « Pas l’Eurovision » en soutien des droits palestiniens
      4 avril | Julia Hunt, Press Association Entertainment Correspondent |Traduction CG pour l’AURDIP
      https://www.aurdip.org/wolf-alice-engage-pour-le-concert.html

      Les gagnants du prix Mercury, Wolf Alice et le rapper Mic Righteous, font partie des artistes annoncés dans le futur concert Not The Eurovision (Pas l’Eurovision) en soutien des droits palestiniens.

      Le guitariste de Faithless, Dave Randall, est aussi sur l’affiche pour « Pas l’Eurovision : soirée pour la Palestine », et d’autres numéros doivent être encore annoncés.

      Organisé par la Campagne de solidarité avec la Palestine, le concert aura lieu à Londres le 18 mai – le jour du concours de chansons de l’Eurovision 2019 à Tel Aviv, Israël.

      Les organisateurs ont déclaré qu’il s’agit d’une invitation à souligner les violations des droits humains dont souffrent les Palestiniens et à protester contre elles, faisant valoir qu’Israël déploie une tactique de « blanchiment par l’art », en utilisant l’Eurovision comme un moyen de masquer ce qu’ils décrivent comme son régime d’apartheid et d’occupation, et en projetant au monde une image « progressiste »

    • Dare to dream
      Michel Bühler, Le Courrier (Suisse) - jeudi 4 avril 2019
      https://lecourrier.ch/2019/04/02/dare-to-dream

      (...) Alertés par les milieux culturels palestiniens, plus d’une centaine d’artistes de renommée internationale ont appelé à boycotter cette finale : peut-on décemment servir de caution à la propagande d’un régime qui bafoue depuis des années toutes les règles du droit international ? ; peut-on innocemment aller gazouiller à Tel Aviv tandis qu’à quelques kilomètres de là les soldats de Tsahal abattent systématiquement les jeunes Gazaouis qui manifestent près de la frontière de leur pays-prison ?

      En Suisse, le mouvement BDS a lancé une pétition [1] demandant aux artistes et à la SSR de renoncer à participer à cette finale. Ayant rassemblé plus d’un millier de signatures, elle est restée sans effet, puisque le chanteur qui doit y représenter notre pays a récemment été désigné.

      J’avais pris note avec tristesse de ce revers. (NB : j’ai oublié le nom de ce chanteur, et la charité m’interdit de dire ce que j’ai pensé de sa prestation… oui, bien qu’elle soit en anglais, je me suis imposé, par souci d’honnêteté, le pensum de l’écouter jusqu’au bout).

      Et voilà que ce sentiment de tristesse a soudain fait place à la stupéfaction, puis à une indignation sans bornes : le slogan que des communicants, semble-t-il hors sol, ont imaginé pour cette manifestation est – tenez-vous bien ! – « Dare to dream » !

  • Emmanuel Macron remanie sa garde rapprochée à l’Elysée, Cédric Pietralunga
    https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2019/02/12/a-l-elysee-macron-remanie-sa-garde-rapprochee_5422437_823448.html

    Après le départ de Sylvain Fort, le stratège du président Ismaël Emelien va partir. Comme un remaniement qui ne dirait pas son nom.

    Des soutiens le réclamaient depuis des mois, Emmanuel Macron s’y est résolu. Alors que le « grand débat » est présenté comme le « coup d’envoi » de l’an II du quinquennat, le chef de l’Etat a décidé de se séparer de sa garde prétorienne, cette poignée de conseillers de l’ombre, presque tous trentenaires, qui l’accompagne depuis Bercy et qui a conquis l’Elysée avec lui mais que ses détracteurs accusent d’isoler le président.

    Alors que les rumeurs se faisaient de plus en plus insistantes, le conseiller spécial Ismaël Emelien a confirmé, lundi 11 février, son prochain départ de l’Elysée. « Je vais partir », a-t-il confié au Point. Considéré comme l’un des plus proches du chef de l’Etat, qui voit en lui « le meilleur stratège politique de Paris », le trentenaire s’en va officiellement parce qu’il va publier un livre « fin mars début avril », comme l’a révélé le JDD le 10 février. Une exposition incompatible avec sa fonction de conseiller de l’ombre, un statut qui convenait idéalement à sa nature de taiseux.

    « Mon départ correspond à une nouvelle étape de mon engagement. Après Bercy, la campagne présidentielle puis l’Elysée, je veux retrouver la confrontation en première ligne », explique M. Emelien, qui a écrit ce livre, sorte de plaidoyer pour la social-démocratie, avec David Amiel, un autre jeune conseiller de M. Macron, lui aussi sur le départ. « On est bien seuls aujourd’hui à défendre le progressisme, on a besoin de relais dans la société et au-delà de nos frontières, et je pense que c’est dans cette position que je serai le plus utile », ajoute l’ancien consultant de chez Havas, assurant qu’il « continuera à aider » le président.

    Quatrième départ en quelques semaines

    Cette annonce intervient alors que le nom d’Ismaël Emelien est régulièrement cité dans l’affaire Benalla, du nom de cet ancien collaborateur élyséen impliqué dans des violences policières lors de manifestations à Paris le 1er mai 2018. Réputés proches, les deux hommes ont gardé le contact après la révélation, en juillet par Le Monde, des agissements de l’ancien garde du corps. Les enquêteurs s’interrogent notamment sur le rôle joué par M. Emelien dans la diffusion sur les réseaux sociaux d’images provenant de caméras de surveillance, donc supposées confidentielles, et tendant à justifier les actes de M. Benalla. A ce jour, le stratège du président n’aurait été entendu ni par la justice, ni par les enquêteurs.

    Selon l’Elysée, il n’y a pourtant aucun rapport entre les deux événements. « Le départ d’Ismaël est convenu de longue date avec le président. Avec ce livre (…), qui se veut à la fois un précis de méthode et de doctrine sur le progressisme, il retrouve les racines de son engagement en politique : manier les idées, les rendre accessibles et les défendre », explique-t-on au Château. « Ce départ ne correspond pas à une volonté de nettoyage de l’entourage, abonde un conseiller. Il résulte d’une logique d’usure normale au bout de vingt mois d’exercice du pouvoir et après une crise aussi violente que celle des “gilets jaunes”. »

    N’empêche, ce départ est le quatrième intervenu en quelques semaines au sein du groupe des « Mormons », comme s’étaient eux-mêmes qualifiés ces très proches du chef de l’Etat. Outre Ismaël Emelien, le conseiller politique Stéphane Séjourné a quitté la présidence le 15 janvier, afin de diriger la campagne de La République en marche (LRM) pour les européennes. De même, le directeur de la communication Sylvain Fort est parti le 25 janvier, officiellement pour « raisons familiales », tandis que Barbara Frugier, la conseillère presse internationale, a été exfiltrée dès la fin 2018. Tous accompagnaient M. Macron depuis son passage au ministère de l’économie, entre 2014 et 2016, et avaient participé à sa campagne.

    Depuis des mois, plusieurs soutiens alertaient le chef de l’Etat sur les dégâts soi-disant provoqués par cet entourage de trentenaires. « Cela dysfonctionne », s’énervait en privé François Bayrou, l’un des rares à s’entretenir toutes les semaines avec M. Macron. « Il n’est pas possible de gouverner l’Etat à quatre ou cinq à l’Elysée, a fortiori quand on n’a pas d’expérience », abondait un ancien membre de l’équipe de campagne, qui continue d’échanger avec le président. « On donne tous les jours des leçons de management mais s’il y a bien un endroit qui n’est pas géré, c’est l’Elysée », ajoutait un habitué du pouvoir. Pour certains, M. Macron doit accepter de se débarrasser enfin des oripeaux de sa campagne s’il veut se couler dans le costume de chef d’Etat.

    L’Elysée sonde nombre de communicants

    « Il ne faut pas donner de signification politique à ces changements », assure Philippe Grangeon, qui a rejoint l’Elysée comme conseiller spécial le 4 février. Ancien conseiller de Dominique Strauss-Kahn et de Nicole Notat à la CFDT, le sexagénaire fait figure de nouvel homme fort au sein de l’organigramme, même s’il n’est présent que trois jours par semaine à l’Elysée. « Le président était entouré de la même équipe depuis quatre ou cinq ans (…). La respiration, c’est une très bonne chose. La diversité des profils est nécessaire. C’est un gage de bon fonctionnement », plaide-t-il aujourd’hui.

    Ces départs pourraient d’ailleurs être suivis par d’autres. Antoine Peillon, actuel conseiller énergie, environnement et transports, va rejoindre Stanislas Guérini à LRM comme directeur de cabinet. Sonya Djemni-Wagner, conseillère justice, serait aussi sur le départ. Surtout, Sibeth Ndiaye, l’emblématique conseillère presse et communication, régulièrement critiquée par les médias qui la rendent pour partie responsable de leurs mauvaises relations avec le chef de l’Etat, pourrait elle aussi évoluer.

    « Le président a proposé à Sibeth de prendre la tête du pôle parlementaire du cabinet, qui était dirigé par Stéphane Séjourné, mais elle a refusé, arguant qu’elle dirigeait aujourd’hui un pôle d’une centaine de personnes », assure un membre du premier cercle du chef de l’Etat. D’autres évoquent sa possible arrivée au service d’information du gouvernement (SIG), l’organisme chargé de gérer la communication de l’exécutif. « Mais elle peut tout aussi bien rester et s’occuper de la réorganisation de la communication de l’Elysée, un chantier qui n’est pas achevé, en se déchargeant des relations quotidiennes avec la presse », assure une proche.

    Seule certitude : l’Elysée a sondé nombre de communicants pour rejoindre l’Elysée. Les noms de Pierre-Henry Brandet, ex-porte-parole du ministère de l’intérieur, de Laurent Glépin, ex-conseiller de Jacques Chirac, ou de Marie-Emmanuelle Assidon, qui a travaillé avec Bernard Cazeneuve à Beauvau puis à Matignon, ont circulé. Franck Louvrier, l’ancien communicant de Nicolas Sarkozy, a même été reçu par M. Macron à l’Elysée.

    Selon nos informations, c’est une femme qui tiendrait aujourd’hui la corde pour reprendre le rôle d’« agent traitant » des journalistes : Mayada Boulos, qui fut la conseillère presse de Marisol Touraine au ministère de la santé lors du précédent quinquennat et qui travaille aujourd’hui au pôle « influences » de l’agence Havas. « C’est une excellente professionnelle », reconnaît-on à l’Elysée, où l’on se refuse néanmoins à confirmer son arrivée, assurant que le président n’a pas pris sa décision.

    Reste le cas d’Alexis Kohler. Ancien directeur de cabinet d’Emmanuel Macron à Bercy, le secrétaire général de l’Elysée est considéré comme le « frère jumeau » du chef de l’Etat. Mais l’énarque alsacien serait épuisé par les vingt premiers mois du quinquennat et chercherait une porte de sortie. Selon nos informations, il aurait un temps envisagé de rejoindre Renault avant de finalement y renoncer, par crainte du conflit d’intérêt mais aussi face aux réticences du constructeur automobile. Contacté par Le Monde, l’Elysée assure qu’il n’en a jamais été question mais reconnaît que M. Kohler ne restera sans doute pas cinq ans au secrétariat général. « La difficulté, c’est qu’il faut lui trouver une sortie par le haut et ce n’est pas évident », décrypte un membre influent de la Macronie.

    Alexis Kohler, le bras droit de Macron critiqué dans la majorité, Sarah Belouezzane, Cédric Pietralunga et Alexandre Lemarié, 19 décembre 2018
    https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/12/19/alexis-kohler-bras-droit-du-president-critique-dans-la-majorite_5399763_8234

    Le secrétaire général de l’Elysée est de ceux qui ont milité pour ne pas céder aux « #gilets_jaunes ».

    Il y a encore quelques mois, tout le monde louait son « intelligence », sa « force de travail », sa « maîtrise » des dossiers les plus techniques. Secrétaire général de l’Elysée et très proche d’Emmanuel Macron, Alexis Kohler est désormais dans le viseur d’une partie de la majorité, qui l’accuse d’isoler le chef de l’Etat et de trop incarner cette technocratie honnie par les « gilets jaunes ».

    Alors que de nombreux parlementaires alertaient ces dernières semaines sur l’état d’exaspération du pays, le haut fonctionnaire est de ceux qui ont milité pour ne pas céder à la rue. « Il était inflexible, disait qu’on devait rester cohérents, ne pas reculer », assure un parlementaire de La République en marche (LRM). « Si le président a mis des semaines à réagir, il n’y est pas pour rien », abonde un conseiller de l’exécutif.

    D’autres s’agacent de la supposée réticence de l’ ancien directeur adjoint du cabinet de Pierre Moscovici à Bercy à s’affranchir de la contrainte des 3 % de déficit public, qui aurait empêché l’exécutif de répondre plus vite aux revendications des « gilets jaunes ». « Kohler est comme Edouard Philippe ou Ribadeau-Dumas [le directeur de cabinet du premier ministre], c’est un orthodoxe budgétaire », assure un ministre venu de la gauche. « Il a les yeux rivés sur les chiffres et ne peut donc pas évaluer les effets d’une mesure dans la vie réelle et ses conséquences politiques. C’est un problème », observe un député LRM.

    « Il est d’une loyauté totale au président »

    S’il est diplômé de l’ENA, le numéro deux de l’Elysée ne fait pourtant pas partie des « grands corps ». A sa sortie de l’école strasbourgeoise, l’Alsacien a intégré le corps des administrateurs civils du ministère des finances, alors qu’Emmanuel Macron a rejoint l’inspection des finances et Edouard Philippe le Conseil d’Etat. Mais il a fait toute sa carrière à Bercy, au Trésor ou à l’Agence des participations de l’Etat. Il fut aussi le directeur de cabinet de M. Macron au ministère de l’économie.
    Alexis Kohler, 46 ans, ferraille d’ailleurs régulièrement avec le chef de l’Etat. « Il passe la moitié de son temps à faire décider le président, ou à l’empêcher de revenir sur une décision prise », assure un familier du château, pour qui le haut fonctionnaire « se crève à cet exercice » alors qu’Emmanuel Macron serait gagné par la procrastination. « Kohler et Macron ne sont pas jumeaux, le président peut lui imposer des choses », estime un poids lourd du gouvernement.

    D’autres réfutent l’idée même d’un président sous influence. « Macron n’aime pas l’idée de premier cercle, de se mettre dans la main de quelqu’un. Il aime diversifier ses interlocuteurs, prendre la température un peu partout », assure un ministre familier des deux hommes. De fait, si le secrétaire général est informé de tous les rendez-vous pris à l’Elysée par le président, il n’a pas la maîtrise de sa messagerie Telegram, que M. Macron utilise pour se forger une opinion, au même titre que les notes techniques de ses conseillers.

    Dans les cabinets, certains voient d’ailleurs en Alexis Kohler un fusible facile pour qui n’ose pas attaquer le chef de l’Etat lui-même : « Il est d’une loyauté totale au président. Ceux qui le critiquent sont ceux qui n’osent pas critiquer Macron », tranche, sévère, un conseiller. Après avoir quitté le gouvernement en 2016, Emmanuel Macron avait lui-même théorisé son rôle de secrétaire général adjoint de l’Elysée auprès de François Hollande : « J’assume tout en n’étant politiquement responsable de rien, puisque je n’étais que conseiller. »

  • The misunderstood 15 hour work week of John Maynard Keynes
    https://hackernoon.com/the-misunderstood-15-hour-work-week-of-john-maynard-keynes-9d4561c96ab6?

    The misunderstood 15 hour workweek of John Maynard KeynesThe promised 15 hour workweek came, but no one noticed it.John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)In 1930, British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological change and productivity improvements would eventually lead to a 15 hour workweek. But today most of the people still work 40 hours or more per week.So what happened or did something happen?I bet most of you haven’t heard of this prediction before. Why? Well because most people would say that John Maynard Keynes was wrong. Since, when you look around you see that most people are not anywhere close to 15 hour workweek, even 40 hour workweek is seen as luxury, and the reality is being somewhere around 50 hours. Right? No, Wrong.That’s not how to verify a theoryLet’s take an (...)

    #work-life-balance #15-hour-work-week #time-management #economics #john-maynard-keynes

  • Child Inmates of South Korea’s Immigration Jail

    Helene* had a challenge that no mother would want. She, with her husband, was a refugee in a foreign land with a foreign language, trying despite all odds to raise her children as best she could. If this weren’t enough of a challenge, Helene was in jail, locked up in a 10-person cell with others she didn’t know. The only time she could leave her cell was for a 30-minute exercise time each day. But her task was more daunting still. Her children were locked up with her.

    Helene’s jail was an immigration detention facility, and her crime was not having enough money to begin refugee applicant proceedings. She spent 23 days in that cell with her two sons. Her oldest, Emerson, was three years and eight months old, and her youngest, Aaron, was only 13 months old. She watched their mental health and physical health slowly deteriorate while her pleadings for help fell on deaf ears.

    *

    In June, American news media were shocked by the revelation that migrant children, who were only guilty of not possessing legal migrant status, were being held in large-scale detention facilities. This was something new—a part of President Donald Trump’s ‘tough on immigration’ stance.

    In South Korea, detaining children simply due to their migration status, or the migration status of their parents, is standard practice.

    Children make up a very small percentage of the total picture of unregistered migrants in South Korea. However, as the nation’s foreign population reaches 2 million and beyond, that small percentage becomes a large number in real terms. The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) doesn’t keep statistics on the exact number of unregistered child migrants in the country.

    Most unregistered child migrants in South Korea fall into one of two broad categories: teenagers who come alone, and infants or toddlers brought by their parents or born to migrants already living in the country. In both cases, the majority of children (or their parents) come from other parts of Asia seeking work in the industrial sector.

    These children often end up in detention facilities when immigration authorities carry out routine crackdowns targeting workplaces in industrial districts or transportation routes workers use to get to these districts. Authorities, by policy, detain any unregistered migrant who is 14 or older. Younger children are technically exempt from detention orders, but parents are often caught in crackdowns while with their children. The parents can’t leave their children on the street to fend for themselves, and so, left with no other options, they choose to bring their children with them into the detention facilities.

    Helene’s case was different. She and her husband brought their sons to South Korea with them when they fled religious persecution in their home country of Liberia. The South Korean government rejected their refugee applications, and the family only had enough money to begin a legal challenge for one person. Emerson and Aaron, along with Helene, became unregistered migrants.

    How they were detained would be comical if their case were not so tragic. After a trip to a hospital, the family was trying to board a subway to return home. Their stroller could not fit through the turnstiles, and after a brief altercation an upset station manager called the police. The police asked to see the family’s papers, but only Helene’s husband had legal status. The police were obligated to arrest Helene due to her unregistered status and turn her over to immigration authorities. Because her children were very young – the youngest was still breastfeeding – she had no viable option but to bring her children with her.

    *

    Helene and her sons were sent to an immigration detention facility in Hwaseong, some 60 kilometers southwest of Seoul. Inside and out, the facility is indistinguishable from a prison. Detainees wear blue jumpsuits with the ironic Korean phrase “protected foreigner” printed in large white letters on the back. They live in 10-person cells with cement walls and steel bars at the front. Each cell has a small common area up front with tables, a sleeping area in the middle, and a bathroom at the back.

    For detainees, these cells become the entirety of their existence until they are released. Food is delivered through a gap in the bars, and the only opportunity to leave the cell is for a brief 30-minute exercise period each day.

    These facilities were never intended to house children, and authorities make little to no effort to accommodate them. Young children have to live in a cell with a parent and as many as eight other adults, all unknown to the child. The detention center doesn’t provide access to pediatricians, child appropriate play and rest time, or even food suitable for young children.

    Government policy states that education is provided only for children detained for more than 30 days. Children have no other children to interact with, and no space to play or explore. During daytime, when the sleeping mats are rolled up and stored, the sleeping area becomes a large open space where children could play. According to Helene, whenever her sons entered that area guards would shout at them to come back to the common area at the front of the cell.

    Emerson’s fear of the guards’ reprimand grew to the point that he refused to use the toilets at the back of the cell because that would mean crossing the sleeping area, instead choosing to soil himself. Even after the family was eventually released, Emerson’s psychological trauma and his refusal to use bathrooms remained.

    The stress and anxiety of being locked in a prison cell naturally takes a severe toll on children’s wellbeing. Like the adults they’re detained with, they don’t know what will happen to them or when they will be released. Unlike the adults, they don’t understand why they are in a prison cell to begin with. Without any way to alleviate the situation, the stress and anxiety they feel turn into mental disorders. These conditions can include depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even increased rates of suicide and self-harm.

    Kim Jong Chul has seen many examples of these symptoms firsthand. Kim is a lawyer with APIL, a public interest law firm, and he’s worked to secure the release of many migrant children held in detention.

    In one such case, May, a 5-year-old migrant from China, spent 20 days in a detention facility with her mother. Over those 20 days, May’s extreme anxiety produced insomnia, a high fever, swollen lips and more. Despite this, her guards never brought a doctor to examine her.

    For most migrants in immigration custody, children included, their release comes only when they are deported. In 2016, authorities held 29,926 migrants in detention, and 96 percent of them were deported. The whole deportation process, from arrest to boarding a plane, typically takes ten days.

    But for children, ten days in detention are enough to develop severe stress and anxiety. Special cases, including refugee applications or a migrant laborer with unpaid wages, can take much longer to process. South Korea’s immigration law doesn’t set an upper limit on migrant detention, and there are cases of migrants held for more than a year. The law also doesn’t require regular judicial review or in-person checks from a case worker at any point in the process. According to Kim from APIL, the longest child detention in recent years was 141 days.

    Existing children’s welfare services would benefit migrant children, but the MOJ opposes any such idea. In the view of the MOJ and the Ministry of Health and Welfare, welfare facilities should be reserved only for citizens and foreigners with legal status.

    Children between the ages of 14 and 18 are yet another matter. The MOJ’s stance is that most of these children are physically similar to adults, highly likely to commit crimes and in general a danger to society, and they need to be detained.

    Kim argues that it’s hard to interpret the MOJ’s stance that migrant teenagers are all potential criminals as anything other than institutional racism. South Korean citizens who are under 18 are considered minors and treated differently in the eyes of the law.

    International treaties ban detaining children, including teenagers, due to migration status, and the South Korean government has signed and ratified each of the UN treaties that relate to children’s rights. It means that under the country’s constitution, the treaties have the same power as domestic law. And yet abuses persist.

    Lawmaker Keum Tae-seob from the ruling Minjoo Party—often called one of the most progressive members of the National Assembly— is fighting this reality. He has proposed a revision to the current immigration law that would ban detention of migrant children, but it has met opposition from the MOJ. Ironically, the ministry argues that because South Korea has signed the relevant international treaties, there is no need to pass a separate domestic law that would ban such detention. This is despite the fact that immigration authorities, who belong to the MOJ, have detained over 200 children over the past 3 years, including many under the age of 14.

    To rally support for a ban on detaining migrant children, APIL and World Vision Korea launched an awareness campaign in 2016, complete with a slick website, emotional videos and a petition. As of this writing, the petition has just under 9,000 signatures, and APIL is hoping to reach 10,000.
    Back in June of last year, another petition received significant media attention. A group of Yemeni refugee applicants—fewer than 600—arrived on the island of Jeju, and in response a citizen’s petition against accepting refugees on the office of the president’s website garnered over 714,000 signatures. A collection of civic groups even organized an anti-refugee rally in Seoul that same month.

    APIL’s campaign has been underway for more than two years, but the recent reaction to Yemeni refugees in Jeju has unveiled how difficult it will be change the government’s position on asylum seekers. A Human Rights Watch report released on Thursday also minced no words in critiquing the government policies: “even though [South Korean president] Moon Jae-in is a former human rights lawyer,” he “did little to defend the rights of women, refugees, and LGBT persons in South Korea.”

    For now, Keum’s bill is still sitting in committee, pending the next round of reviews. Helene’s family has been in the UK since her husband’s refugee status lawsuit failed.

    *Helene is a pseudonym to protect the identity of her and her family.

    https://www.koreaexpose.com/child-migrant-inmates-south-korea-immigration-jail-hwaseong
    #enfants #enfance #mineurs #rétention #détention_administrative #Corée_du_Sud #migrations #sans-papiers #réfugiés #asile

  • Fade to pleasure 18.2
    http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/ftp/fade-to-pleasure-18-2-

    We’re out past the end game where things get fuzzy, less thingy, though in past times we practiced precision concrete as a slot machine.

    But to be precise you need to stop a moment which turns out to be impracticable and besides speed is of the essence.

    Herrmutt Lobby & Stéphane Mercier Four of Three

    Morgan Blanc Pressure

    Morgan Blanc Pressure

    iZem Major Stef

    L-Vis 1990 Do My Ting (Funky Refix)

    Flore He’s Here

    Swet Shop Boys Half Moghul Half Mowgli

    Claude VonStroke & Green Velvet - Mind Yo Bizness (Original #mix)

    Maya Danon Dazed CYRK Chappers Said So

    The Micronauts Dancizer

    Falty dl because you

    Migos Bad and Boujee (Ben Dragon Remix)

    Tycho Epoch Luttrell Remix

    Cooly G Weakest Link

    Broadcasted & hosted by #snooba on Panik (Brussels-Be) Grenouille (Marseille) Canal (...)

    #dub #deep #downtempo #mix,dub,snooba,deep,downtempo
    http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/ftp/fade-to-pleasure-18-2-_06048__1.mp3

  • Brexit : « Les députés britanniques semblent favorables à un accord plus proche de l’UE »
    https://www.crashdebug.fr/international/15503-brexit-les-deputes-britanniques-semblent-favorables-a-un-accord-plu

    Dans le quartier de la City, à Londres, le 16 janvier 2019. ED ALCOCK / M.Y.O.P. POUR « LE MONDE »

    Philippe Bernard, correspondant du Monde à Londres, a répondu aux questions des internautes à la suite du vote du Parlement britannique contre l’accord sur le Brexit.

    Lire aussi : May et le Brexit en sursis après le vote sanction de Westminster

    Lili : Quel est le pronostic pour le vote de confiance ? Comment sont comptées les abstentions, si s’abstenir est permis (dans le vote d’hier aucune abstention n’est rapportée) ?

    Jeremy Corbyn, le chef du Labour, a déposé cette motion de censure hier soir dans la foulée du vote des députés car il l’avait promis en application de sa stratégie de faire tomber le gouvernement May pour déclencher de nouvelles élections législatives. Mais il a peu de chances de (...)

    #En_vedette #Actualités_internationales #Actualités_Internationales

  • Fade to pleasure 17.2
    http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/ftp/fade-to-pleasure-17-2-

    Don’t waste words on a hollow breeze You have feet, have you not? Use them against the wind Walk or run as you please

    Cuthead Painquilizer Falty DL Discoko Craig Bratley Mannequin (feat. Penuckle) (Ewan Pearson #mix) Mehmet Aslan Mechanical Turk (Courtesy of Karpov not Kasparov) Rick Grant Loper Malala Savoir D Pulse Seen Today (Ron Basejam Remix) Maya Danon Dazed Yoko Zuna Chunky Munky Joey B - 911 feat. Medikal (prod. by Kuvie) (clean) Falty dl because you Mr. Fingers Praise to the Vibes (feat. Nicole Wray) Falty DL All In The Place Doc Scott Blue Skies (2015 Remaster)

    Keres Scherer illustration

    #techno #jungle #idm #deep #down_tempo #mix,techno,jungle,idm,deep,down_tempo
    http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/ftp/fade-to-pleasure-17-2-_06009__1.mp3

  • Constant @ Transmediale
    http://constantvzw.org/site/Constant-Transmediale.html

    The 2019 edition of transmediale focuses on “the role of emotions, empathy, and cultural emergence in digital culture.” This year, Constant will be involved in multiple workshops and events: Thursday 31 January 15:00-18:00 The Affective Infrastructure Study Circle Workshop with Maya Indira Ganesh, Femke Snelting, Marija Bozinovska Jones, Lou Cornum, Tung-Hui Hu, Fernanda Monteiro, Nadège, Pedro Oliveira https://2019.transmediale.de/content/study-circle-affective-infrastructures Friday 1 (...)

    And more...

    #And_more...