Latest news with #TheLeft
Yahoo
15 minutes ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
German lawmakers criticize plan to curb refugee family reunification
German lawmakers have criticized the government's plans to suspend family reunification for some groups of refugees. The German lower house of parliament held its first consultation on a draft bill on the suspension on Friday, at which Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt reiterated his desire to limit irregular migration. There is "no single switch that can be flipped to solve the problem of illegal migration," Dobrindt said. Instead, he said, a variety of measures at the national and European level were necessary. His comments sparked outrage from lawmakers from the Greens and The Left party, who argued that family reunification was not irregular migration, but an orderly procedure in which it was clear who was entering the country. Green Party lawmaker Schahina Gambir criticized the planned reform as inhumane, saying that "families belong together" and charging that anyone who blocks legal routes is promoting human trafficking. Clara Bünger, of The Left party, described the draft bill as "anti-Christian" and "anti-family." The proposed bill aims to suspend family reunification for two years for people holding so-called "subsidiary protection status," who are allowed to remain in Germany due to the threat of political persecution in their homelands, despite lacking formal refugee status. The bill says that almost 400,000 residents have subsidiary protection. Around three-quarters are reportedly Syrian nationals. The bill foresees that these people will only be able to bring close family members - spouses, children and, in the case of unaccompanied minors, parents - to Germany in exceptional cases. Family reunification for people with subsidiary protection is already restricted to 1,000 relatives in total per month, unlike for those with refugee status.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Yes, There Was A Media Scandal In 2024. No, It Wasn't About Joe Biden.
WASHINGTON — Early on in Donald Trump's first term, a favorite riposte from right-wing accounts on social media to real and perceived cultural excesses from 'The Left' was simply: 'This is how we got Trump.' Eight years later, we're getting another round of this same clever retort, only this time the culprits are not progressive activists, but reporters who covered the Joe Biden White House. Apparently, we collectively conspired with Biden family members and aides to hide his worsening physical and mental condition from America. It's an amazing assertion, given that polls in early 2024 found that some 80% of Americans thought that Biden was too old to be president. Focus group participants said they were shocked he was even running again. It turns out that people drew their own conclusions from watching his halting public speeches and videos of his increasingly noticeable old-man's shuffle. This conspiracy, clearly, failed miserably pretty much from the get-go. People who are surprised that the Democratic establishment stuck with Biden as long as it did do not understand presidential campaigns. The single biggest factor that determines an election is whether the candidate is already the sitting president. Incumbency offers tremendous advantages, from fundraising to the imagery of that big, blue-and-white 747 swooping in. Had Biden announced in late 2022 or early 2023 that he would not run again, those advantages would have instantly evaporated for Democrats. Do people believe that an open field primary season would have produced a candidate who would have beaten Trump? The great irony is that there absolutely was malfeasance by the media in its coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign — not in how it covered the sitting president, but in how it covered the challenger. Donald Trump assaulted the Constitution he had sworn to defend after he lost reelection in 2020. He invited his followers to Washington long after the votes had been counted, whipped them up into an angry mob and then sicced them on his own vice president and Congress to coerce them into awarding him a second term. It was the closest America has come to losing our democracy since the first year of the Civil War. Yet within weeks of Jan. 6, 2021, reporters began making the trek to Mar-a-Lago to interview him and somehow managed to file stories that elided the day entirely. I recall listening to a podcast interview with one who was asked how Trump had explained his behavior on Jan. 6, and the reporter replied that the topic had not come up. I was and remain dumbfounded by that. As a young reporter, I used to cover criminals full time. The idea of agreeing to a jailhouse interview of a suspect with the understanding that I would not detail the charges against him in the story never would have occurred to me. Even if it had, my editors never would have tolerated such an arrangement. And yet by late spring 2022, that is precisely what started happening. The political press corps began normalizing the hell out of Donald Trump. They downplayed or flat-out ignored the fundamental violence he had committed against our democracy in their coverage in return for the possibility of an interview or even just anonymous quotes from top advisers. (Because, really, what kind of reporter are you if can't publish a few hours ahead of time whether Trump is going to call Gov. Ron DeSantis 'Meatball Ron' or 'Fat Ron' in his rally speech?) Just as one example: Trump, unlike every other modern presidential nominee, refused to take a traveling press pool with him. Instead, he and his staff handpicked reporters for each trip. You can probably guess which reporters were invited and which ones weren't. There was an implicit understanding that access to the Republican nominee meant you would not portray him as a fundamental, proven threat to American democracy. Which, of course, he was back then, and which he continues to prove himself to be now on a near-daily basis. I don't mean to overstate the importance of the media's role in Trump's return. With the exponential growth of niche news outlets, a great number of them little more than propaganda shops bankrolled by one anti-democratic billionaire or another, it is easy for those so inclined to choose information sources guaranteed not to upset their existing worldviews. That said, repetition across a broad swath of the media matters. If reminders of Trump's actions leading up to and on Jan. 6 had been repeated as frequently as, say, Hillary Clinton's decision to use a private email server, who knows what might have happened. A non coup-attempting, pro-democracy nominee could well have emerged from the Republican primary. In the end, though, in a market economy, the customer is always right. And here, the customer was the voter who watched Jan. 6 unfold live on television, watched as Trump's mob attacked police officers in his name, watched as prosecutors laid out a case for why what he did broke the law and then decided that all of that was less bad than Biden's inability to control grocery prices. The sad truth is that had inflation come back down close to 3% in late 2022, rather than in mid-2023, Joe Biden would likely be in his second term right now. For all the Sturm und Drang about his mental deterioration, he managed to pull the country out of a pandemic and, along with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, avoided a recession, delivering a solid economy with low unemployment and decent growth. He brought massive, long-needed investments in high-tech industry and low-tech roads and bridges. He pulled NATO together to stand against the most egregious war of conquest since 1939. Apart from the Afghanistan withdrawal, which actually happened before this deterioration, what bad decisions did he make because of his age? While it's absolutely correct that he had become terrible at the public performance part of the job — although he was never really good at that — there seems to be little evidence that his age affected his ability to analyze facts and make sound choices. But inflation didn't come down soon enough, and now we have a president who is almost as old as Biden, but with the temperament of a toddler and the mores of an 11-year-old boy from the 'Lord of the Flies' island. The political media's efforts to normalize him notwithstanding, it was plain from all of Trump's open talk about revenge and his vows to grab extra-constitutional power that America was risking a slide into autocracy if voters returned him to the White House. An even sadder truth is that, faced with a choice between democracy and the promise of cheaper Doritos, America went with the Doritos. We were never going to get the latter, and, as is becoming clearer by the day, we'll be lucky to get through this with some semblance of the former.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Far-left German opposition slams police over handling of deportations
Germany's opposition The Left party has slammed the authorities over the way the country is conducting deportations, as the number of people forced to leave the country surpassed 6,000 in the first quarter. "I am aware of several deportations in which the police acted brutally and without any empathy," Clara Bünger, the far-left party's spokeswoman on refugee policy, told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland media group in comments published Friday. "We are talking about families being torn apart in cold blood or sick people being literally kidnapped from hospital and carted off to deportation flights," Bünger said. She said it appeared that authorities were acting according to the idea that "you can do almost anything to people who are required to leave the country." Her comments come after Germany deported 6,151 individuals in the first three months of the year, according to the response to a parliamentary inquiry by Bünger's party from Tuesday. In 2024, some 20,100 people were deported in total. Germany's new conservative-led government, which took office on May 6, has vowed to crack down on irregular migration. While it has since intensified border checks and allowed police to turn away people looking to claim asylum, the first quarter figures are attributable to the previous centre-left administration, which also toughened its stance on migration amid a series of attacks attributed to suspects with migrant roots. Most people deported in the first quarter of 2025 were deported to Turkey, at 502. This was followed by deportations to Georgia (454), France (333), Spain (325) and Serbia (291). A total of 1,715 people were deported under the EU's Dublin rules, which stipulates that in general the EU country the refugee first enters is responsible for processing their application for asylum.
Euronews
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
"Brussels, my love?" Gazans 'smash macaroni to make bread'
We are joined by Marc Botenga, Belgian MEP from The Left, Evin Incir, Socialist MEP from Sweden and Peter Hefele, the policy director of the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies. The panel discussed the EU role in the Israel-Hamas war. A Dutch proposal to review the EU's trade and cooperation with Israel over the situation in Gaza is gaining support among a group of member states. It will be discussed formally by foreign ministers in Brussels next week. Antoine Renard from the World Food Programme - who is just back from Gaza - told "Brussels, my love?" that 'the road is coming to an end in Gaza'. This week, the French President Macron slammed the government of Benjamin Netanyahu for not allowing water or medicine into the strip. The Israeli government insists that the European hospital in Gaza that they bombed this week was a command centre for Hamas. The panel also reflected on the news of the new 69 year old Pope Leo. Peter Hefele said the new Pope will have to work on internal reforms but will not be a game changer. "I think it's a lot of continuity". Watch 'Brussels, my love?' in the player above and keep an eye out for our new language editions!
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Germany records increase in attacks on refugee shelters in 2024
German authorities recorded 255 politically motivated crimes against refugee shelters in 2024, the Interior Ministry said on Thursday, revising the previously reported number of 218. The figure, provided in response to an enquiry by The Left party, was significantly higher than the 176 attacks on refugee shelters reported in 2023. The ministry's data show that the number of attacks has risen significantly since 2017. The government had previously said the number of politically motivated crimes against refugee accommodation had remained below 200 per year over the last five years. This followed the highest figure recorded in recent years of 284, reported in 2017. The number of politically motivated crimes committed against refugees outside shelters was also revised upwards for 2024 due to subsequent reports to a total of 2,271, remaining slightly below the 2,450 recorded in 2023. These included 287 violent crimes in 2024, in which 235 people were injured, the ministry said. The Interior Ministry said 30 politically motivated crimes had been recorded in the first quarter of 2025, in which refugee accommodation was either the scene of the crime or the target of an attack. The police have been able to identify suspects in six cases.
