Toilet Paper Blues
10 months, 19 days ago
Migrant moms at Pennsylvania center suspend hunger strike’ due to menaces’
10 months, 19 days ago22 women who refused meals to protest their indefinite detention at the Berks County Residential Center in Pennsylvania say officials pushed them to eat
Female asylum seekers held with their children at the Berks County Residential Center in Pennsylvania say they have been pushed to suspend a two-week long hunger strike due to menaces from immigration officials.
In a letter to reporters, 22 mothers who rejected dinners to protest their indefinite detention said they were told: If our health is weak, the government can take our children from us and send us to incarcerates for adults.
The females are now eating one meal a day, but say they will resume the ten-strike within a week if they have not been released. Lawyers who visited their clients during the hunger strike said some had lost significant amounts of weight, about 10 lbs in some cases.
Their faces appeared sunken and gaunt, said attorney Carol Anne Donohoe.
All of the women have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since they arrived with their children at the US-Mexico border seeking asylum from violence in El Salvador and Honduras. Their protest has raised questions about whether ICE is flouting a federal magistrates mandate that sets a 20 -day limit on the time children can be detained.
This week, four of the families will mark a full year in custody, including one from El Salvador that includes two girls who are 14 and 16. The teens have missed school while detained, and reportedly have depression and suicidal thoughts.
They have this attitude that either were going to die here or die there, and it scares me, said the familys lawyer, Bridget Cambria.
In January, the World Bank ranked El Salvador as the worlds deadliest country outside a war zone.
Immigration officials told the Guardian the safety, well-being and housing conditions of those in its custody are of utmost importance to the agency. They added that the length of hour a family is incarcerated at Berks may be related to the current status of their immigration cases.
The majority of the families are blocked from deportationwhile a civil rights lawsuit they form part of winds through the courts. In the meantime, Donohoe argues they should be allowed to live with family members who live in the US.
We have sent all the requested documents about their sponsors to show they are not a flight danger, but have been categorically denied, Donohoe said.
This week, Human Rights First released an updated report on conditions at Berks based on a 25 July visit by a delegation of psychologists and pediatricians, as well as the facilitys own health reports. It includes a description of a 10 -year-old girl detained for eight months at Berks who suffers from nocturnal enuresis( urinary incontinence) and must wear a nappy at night. A facility psychologist wrote: The impression she left on me and the interpreter was that her enuresis was related to nothing more than laziness. But an independent psychological evaluation concluded she suffers from post-traumatic stress ailment and should be seen by a specialist.
Dr Michelle Silva, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine who participated in the tour, said the extended detention of families was very concerning because it compromises a childs developing sense of identity and security in the world around them.
On Tuesday, nation representative Leslie Acosta held a press conference about the hunger strike and called on Barack Obama and federal officials to put a plan in place to release the families in a dignified human route. She also requested a meeting with Pennsylvanias governor to create a plan that ensures new households are not acknowledged or transferred to Berks since the nation revoked its license last year to operate small children residential facility because it was also holding adults. The district is appealing that decision.
Next month, Obama will host a United Nations summit on refugees and migrants in New York City, where he is expected to face calls to end family detention.
He placed it on steroids and turned it into the ogre that its become, Donahoe said, calling the practice a stain on his legacy.
Read more: www.theguardian.com
Morgan Freeman runs around the world searching for God
10 months, 19 days ago
( Photo credit: National Geographic Channels/ Matthew Paul Turner) ( National Geographic Channels)
LOS ANGELES- Morgan Freeman played God in “Bruce Almighty, ” but for “The Story of God with Morgan Freeman, ” he’s just a man, who traveled to 20 cities in seven different countries in search of answers to questions such as: Who is God? What happens when we die? Why does evil happen?
The six-episode “The Story of God, ” premiering Sunday, April 3 on National Geographic Channel, takes the Oscar winner to some of humanity’s greatest religion sites, including Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, India’s Bodhi Tree, and the pyramids in Egypt, to uncover the long-lost religions of our ancestors and to immerse himself in modern-day religion experiences and rituals.
“What we’ve done is go around the world asking, observing, trying to get that sense of what binds us all together, ” Freeman told FOX4 11. “We came away with the idea that we’re much more the same than we are different. Every religion is after the same thing.”
The end goal of “The Story of God” is to open an interfaith dialogue about ideas and values that we all share , not that we disagree on. Toward that objective, it investigates the beliefs of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and more, with the assistance of archaeologists and holy humen. It covers the topics: Beyond Death( April 3 ), Apocalypse( April 10 ), Creation( April 17 ), Who is God( April 24 ), Evil( May 1) and Miracles( May 8).
“I don’t think that we’ve said or shown anything that they are able to upset any orthodoxies, ” says Freeman, who approached the quest for knowledge with the initiative of total adoption. “We’ve made no judgment calls. We didn’t set out to prove or refute, only to learn.”
Morgan doesn’t share his personal notions in the series, feeling it’s more important for him to be neutral. But he does pass on some of the knowledge that he acquired on this spiritual journey.
One such bit is that the true definition of the word apocalypse is often misunderstood. It doesn’t mean the end of days. “It doesn’t mean the end of anything, ” he says. “It entails unveiling. It’s the awakening. It’s the next best thing to enlightenment, right? ”
The beginning of religion is also looked at in the episode encompassing evil from the perspective that the proposed establishment of religion may be inextricably tied to the need to control evil.
“If you ask the basic question: Did God generate? Then if God made evils, why? The style we get around that is by saying, ‘Well, he also gave us free will.’ We only know that evil exists. Why, we haven’t figured out yet, actually, ” Morgan admits.
“The Story of God” also presupposes that religion was created to answer man’s questions. But today, we know why the earth shakes and divides, why the sunshine occasionally goes dark, or why there is a drought. Having that wisdom, however, does not displace the concept or the faith in the existence of God.
“I guess the more informed you are, the deeper your notions can be, ” says Freeman, when asked if modern knowledge has changed religion. “I don’t think there were people more informed than the Catholic hierarchy or the Jewish hierarchy from the head rabbi on down. The nature of religion must be amended with knowledge. The reality of religion gets more sound, more pronounced.”
“The Story of God” premieres Sunday, April 3 on National Geographic Channel.
