#HEADLINES: Kidnapped Nigerian Girls Located, New Safety Requirements for Keystone XL, Using Jailed Migrants as a Pool of Cheap Labor, Leaders of India and Pakistan Hold Rare Meeting, DHS May Reduce Deportations of Nonviolent Immigrants, Brown University Faces Federal Complaint for Allowing Rapist Back, Israel-Palestine: Europe Should Atone for Its Sins
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| AFP |
"'The good news for the parents of the girls is that we know where they are, but we cannot tell you,' Badeh was quoted as saying. 'But where they are held, can we go there with force? We can't kill our girls in the name of trying to get them back.'
"Most officials think any raid to rescue them would be fraught with danger and probably not worth the risk that the girls would be killed by their captors - an Islamist group that has shown a degree of ruthlessness in killing civilians."
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| Tony Gutierrez/AP Photo |
"Safety regulators have quietly placed two extra conditions on construction of TransCanada Corp.'s Keystone XL oil pipeline after learning of potentially dangerous construction defects involving the southern leg of the Canada-to-Texas project.
"The defects — high rates of bad welds, dented pipe and damaged pipeline coating — have been fixed. But the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration wants to make sure similar problems don't occur during construction of the pipeline's controversial northern segment, which is on hold pending a decision by the Obama administration."
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| Ramin Rahimian/New York Times |
"As the federal government cracks down on immigrants in the country illegally and forbids businesses to hire them, it is relying on tens of thousands of those immigrants each year to provide essential labor — usually for $1 a day or less — at the detention centers where they are held when caught by the authorities.
"This work program is facing increasing resistance from detainees and criticism from immigrant advocates. In April, a lawsuit accused immigration authorities in Tacoma, Wash., of putting detainees in solitary confinement after they staged a work stoppage and hunger strike. In Houston, guards pressed other immigrants to cover shifts left vacant by detainees who refused to work in the kitchen, according to immigrants interviewed here."
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| Manish Swarup/Associated Press |
"Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, met on Tuesday with his new Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, in a swiftly arranged bilateral session that caught many by surprise and offered some hope that the two countries may resume a tentative peace process after a year and a half of frosty silence.
"Mr. Sharif was one of seven leaders invited to Mr. Modi’s swearing-in on Monday because Pakistan is a member of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, but the ceremony was overshadowed by his interactions with Mr. Modi, a Hindu nationalist who has little track record in foreign policy and used hard-line oratory on Pakistan during the parliamentary campaign."
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| John Moore/Getty Images |
"Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson is expected to recommend small but significant changes to Secure Communities, a controversial program that now ranks repeat immigration violators alongside violent criminals on the priority list for deportation.
"The change would slow the pace of deportations and potentially ease concerns of immigrants who now fear any contact with police. It also could help relieve political pressure on the White House from labor and Latino groups that have criticized President Obama as the 'deporter in chief' for his administration's aggressive enforcement of immigration laws.
"Advocates say the move would help local police concentrate on dangerous criminals and make immigration enforcement more 'humane,' as the president ordered in March."
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| YouTube |
"A federal complaint filed Thursday against Brown University accuses the Ivy League school of violating the law by failing to expel a student the institution found had raped a fellow undergraduate.
"Brown student Lena Sclove, who was raped and choked by a male acquaintance in August 2013, said she filed complaints accusing Brown of violating the Title IX gender equity law, and the Clery Act campus security law. The complaints will be reviewed by the U.S. Education Department, which may investigate and impose sanctions."
"The British politician Arthur J Balfour, who gave his name to the fateful 1917 declaration, was an earnest supporter of the 1905 Alien Act, which was specifically designed to stem the inflow into Britain of Jews fleeing from persecution in tsarist Russia.
"Subsequently, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, a wholly European abomination, European governments, as well as those of the United States, Canada and Australia, shamefully brushed aside Arab pleas to treat the resettlement of displaced Jews as a duty and obligation for the whole world and refused to relax their immigration restrictions, thereby forcing most of them to seek to build new lives in Palestine, even though many would have preferred to settle elsewhere.
"Rather than continuing to oppose justice, human decency and international law through unquestioning support for an ethno-religious-supremacist, settler-colonial experiment, European states, which are no longer anti-Semitic, could and should be opening their doors wide to any and all Israeli Jews who might be tempted to build a new and better life for themselves and their children by returning to their countries of origin or emigrating to other countries of their choice. They should offer them immediate residency rights, generous resettlement assistance and a fast track to citizenship (if they do not already have it)."
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