Select Page ::

Oil & Gas Blockchain Consortium goes ahead with project around expense approval – The Block – The Block

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

The OOC Oil & GasBlockchain Consortium has collaborated with Canadian software firm GuildOne tosuccessfully test the industrys first blockchain application for Authorizationfor Expenditure (AFE) balloting.

AFE focuses on cost andexpense approval, particularly in the upstream oil and gas process wherebylarge expenditure is required with regards to exploration, development, andproduction.

Integrating blockchainto conventional AFE balloting would streamline and reduce the manuallyintensive and largely paper-driven process of approving capital and expense projectsand provide immutable documentation of the final interests, the consortium notes.The AFE balloting proof of concept (POC) tested the ability to send ballots andmake elections digitally utilising the technology, with smart contract enabledworkflows calculating working interests automatically.

This year, the AFEballoting scope will be expanded to capture complicated scenarios, whereasinitial design and testing will be executed on the joint interest billingexchange process that deals with the billing and payment of expendituresbetween joint venture partners.

In September, the consortium announced that it would start testing the blockchain technology to lowering administrative costs in their field operations, along with reducing payment disputes and risk of fraud. It was reported that the contract was given to Houston-based software company Data Gumbo to pilot blockchain for water handling services in the Bakken shale field in North Dakota.

This time last year, post trade management platform VAKT announced three new strategic investors, in the shape of oil and gas giants Chevron, Total, and Reliance Industries, which are among the five of the worlds top ten largest oil and gas companies by market capitalisation. VAKTs blockchain-based platform is said to be the worlds first fully operational enterprise-grade blockchain solution that assures major efficiency gains and cost savings for post-trade processing, including trade finance.

Interested in hearing more in person?Find out more at theBlockchain Expo World Series, Global, Europe and North America.

See more here:

Oil & Gas Blockchain Consortium goes ahead with project around expense approval - The Block - The Block

Ubisoft Might Be The First Major Games Company To Geek Out Over Blockchain – Cointelegraph

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

Its already well-theorized that its not cryptocurrency or decentralized finance apps, but gaming that will actually drive blockchain use cases in the real world.

While this has moved many smaller development companies and hobbyist programmers to release their own blockchain-driven games, distributed ledger technologys reception among mainstay gaming companies has so far largely been neutral.

But thats about to change in the wake of Ubisofts partnership with Ultra, a DLT-driven gaming platform that might be fairly described as Steam on the blockchain. Users can earn digital currency, buy games, and resell them.

Ubisoft is the mainstream gaming giant responsible for the Assassins Creed franchise, Far Cry, and a whole range of other commercial hits. The company knows how to make and market games that people actually play, and they know how to do it exceptionally well.

The professional, at-scale approach to game development within a blockchain paradigm isnt exactly common. Most blockchain games nowadays are by passion project developers or small-scale commercial enterprises. Perhaps due to the technologys association with regulatory uncertainty, game developer heavyweights are mostly keeping blockchain at arms length. Except now Ubisoft is going to become a block producer on Ultras associated UOS blockchain.

This move is purportedly about lending UOS more trust since Ubisoft is such an established company, and its hardware is now part of the ecosystem that approves transactions in UOS tokens that are confirmed by other block producers. It is also not too great a stretch of the imagination to hypothesize that Ubisoft could begin developing blockchain-dependent games for the Ultra platform.

But thats raw speculation for now. Until then, Ubisoft is lending its hardware and credibility in support of a new crypto gaming project.

Ubisoft Might Be The First Major Games Company To Geek Out Over Blockchain - Cointelegraph

How the Africa Blockchain Institute is shaping the regions blockchain future – CoinGeek

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

Acquiring skills in blockchain technology hasnt been easy. Reputable learning institutions are only getting started with their blockchain programs. In Africa, acquiring blockchain skills is even more challenging since leading colleges have yet to offer blockchain-related courses. The Africa Blockchain Institute (ABI) is out to change this, promoting the adoption, development, and use of blockchain in the continent.

The institute was established to impart skills in blockchain technology at a time when the continent is standing up to be counted as a blockchain hub. As CoinGeek reported, 2019 has been quite the year for Africa in regards to blockchain adoption. The ABI wants to ensure this adoption rises even higher in the coming years.

In an interview with CoinGeek, Kayode Babarinde, executive director of the institute, said, Africa Blockchain Institute was founded on the premise of promoting theadoption, development, and use of blockchain technology by providinghigh quality blockchain education to professionals, entrepreneurs,government regulators, and the public.

The pilot phase was conducted in Ghana, a country considered to be among the leaders in blockchain adoption. The ABI launched the inaugural class on Blockchain Essentials Certification, where participants were introduced to the fundamentals of blockchain technology, equipping them with tools and platforms to get them started, then, providing them with opportunities to scale. This pilot was a huge success, with a high number of interested learners. The institute also got the support of several entities, including the World Economic Forum through its Global Shapers initiative.

Its been an interesting journey so far, Babarinde tells us. Despite blockchain being a nascent technology, interest has been steadily rising. Both the private and public entities have recognized the massive opportunities the technology presents and are increasingly seeking to integrate it.

He stated:

It has become an everyday discussion from businesses, academia, medical industry, forensics, cybersecurity, and tourism. These industries and more are already adopting blockchain. Above all, the financial use case of blockchain has been on the rise in recent times, showing great growth especially in Africa.

The pilot phase in Ghana has helped shape ABIs goals and outlook for its programs. Its next phase is in Rwanda where its going to set up the first blockchain school this year. So, why Rwanda?

Babarinde told us, Since the Blockchain Institute is a Pan African project, we thought itwell to set up the headquarters here, because Rwanda is gradually becoming thetechnology hub of Africa as many major tech businesses are nowsetting up here.The leadership of the country is very forward looking, and supportiveof technology such as blockchain, in line with the Digital Transformation agenda. The country encourages innovation, thereby creating enablingenvironment for businesses to thrive. The ease of doing business isgreat, and the policies are very supporting.

You cant talk about blockchain adoption in African without diving into regulations. And while the narrative is that most African countries lack any definitive laws, Babarinde revealed that efforts are underway in most countries.

He remarked, There are actually many regulatory frameworks in Africa, just thatthey are at the initial stage. African governments are seriouslyworking towards progressive regulations, with support from theblockchain communities. But even before the regulations from thegovernments, blockchain communities are already doing well in joiningforces to curb some of the irregularities in the space. I am verypositive about the outcomes of these activities, including our work onresearch and development on blockchain regulations.

ABIs efforts will go a long way in imparting blockchain skills to entrepreneurs, students, regulators and the general public. Already, the institute is working closely with the Blockchain DLT Rwanda Association to recommend enabling regulations to the East African country.

Babarinde concluded, The future of blockchain in Africa is bright. There is lot of work to be done, butthe possibilities are endless.

The Genesis protocol upgrade on February 4, 2020 is a monumental step in the history of Bitcoin, and will see BSV returned as close as possible to the original protocol as envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto. Visit theGenesis Hard Fork pageto learn more.

To receive the latest CoinGeek.com news, special discounts on CoinGeek Conferences and other inside information direct to your inbox, pleasesign upfor our mailing list.

Originally posted here:

How the Africa Blockchain Institute is shaping the regions blockchain future - CoinGeek

Key Trends of Blockchain in Healthcare in 2020 – Verdict Medical Devices – Medical Device Network

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

]]>

Blockchain technology has a place in any commercial network that is strongly motivated to avoid allowing a single central party to coordinate and approve transactions within the network. While the technicality of blockchain has a steep learning curve, there is tremendous potential in blockchains application across the healthcare space, well beyond the financial industry. While the perfect application of blockchain seems futuristic, some pilot projects are ongoing. Here are the top trends of blockchain usage in healthcare in 2020.

Increasing blockchain usage cases on healthcare supply chains

Blockchain technology will have a bigger role to play in supporting the digitisation of supply chains, as well as increasing transparency and efficiency. Healthcare organizations, from manufacturers to retailers, can trace products through supply chains to ensure authenticity or flag potentially damaging in-transit events, such as signs of tampering, extreme environmental conditions, or careless handling. If a manufacturer identifies a quality issue with a device or drug, blockchain can help vendors expedite recalls by quickly determining the location of any inventory across the supply chain that needs to be kept out of circulation.

The FDAs Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) is intended to increase regulatory oversight of counterfeit, stolen, contaminated, or otherwise harmful drugs. Some pilot projects under the DSCSA test how blockchain can secure information sharing across healthcare enterprises. For example, KPMG, IBM, Merck, and Walmart have been chosen for a pilot program that will explore using blockchain technology to improve the security of prescription drug supply and distribution. More companies started implementing blockchain technology in response to DSCSA. Genentech, a subdivision of the Roche Group, Pfizer, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen are working with the blockchain start-up MediLedger Project, which is in the process of creating a platform that allows manufacturers to track their products along with secure supply chain data, and demonstrate adherence to the DSCSA.

Closer integration with other IT innovation

IT innovation such as artificial intelligence (AI), hybrid Cloud solutions, and blockchain implementations will be considered as supplemental technologies that can speed-up the adoption of new technologies. The new hybrid Cloud-at-customer solutions provide highly scalable public Cloud applications and services while keeping personal healthcare data behind enterprise firewalls to conform to regulatory requirements. The use of AI goes beyond traditional analytics, as it aggregates and then extracts insights by recognizing patterns and correlations across large volumes of data that are stored on hybrid clouds and safely organized on blockchain platforms. By being integrated into many Internet of Things (IoT)-connected devices and wearables, blockchain has the potential to uncover demographic trends, accelerate R&D in the healthcare industry, and ultimately improve patient outcomes in the near future.

Faster growth in emerging markets

Emerging economies are very pro-blockchain and will increase investment in 2020. More manufacturing-oriented countries, particularly in Asia, stand to benefit from the implementation of blockchain. The Chinese government has positioned itself to dominate the blockchain space with the most patents related to blockchain. The Chinese State Council included blockchain development in the nations 13th Five-Year Plan. In 2019, president of China Xi Jinping said blockchain will play a major role in building Chinas strength in cyberspace, developing the digital economy, and advancing economic and social development. In addition, more countries will establish blockchain-based healthcare systems. Estonia has become the first country to use blockchain for healthcare on a national scale.

Following Estonia, in 2018, the UAE set out an ambitious plan to use blockchain technology to improve different aspects of the lives of its citizens, such as banking, transportation, and healthcare. The initiative set the country on a path to become a fully functional blockchain-based government by 2021. The healthcare platform provides a data-sharing solution that enables health professionals, including doctors, pharmacists, technicians, and local licensing health authorities, to save and share the assessment information.

GlobalData is this websites parent business intelligence company.

See the original post here:

Key Trends of Blockchain in Healthcare in 2020 - Verdict Medical Devices - Medical Device Network

DLive Joins BitTorrent Ecosystem and Begins Migration to TRON Blockchain – PRNewswire

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

Starting today, DLive and its blockchain development team will collaborate with the BitTorrent team to bolster its products and services. BLive, the live streaming platform introduced by BitTorrent in early 2019, will be merged into the DLive platform, and their team will join the DLive team. DLive will begin utilizing the BitTorrent File-Sharing System (BTFS), a distributed file sharing and storage system, to allow all content living on DLive to truly move towards decentralization. DLive will also merge its account systems with BitTorrent's to further integrate each community with the other. With this collaborative effort, BitTorrent's 100 million monthly active users can easily gain access to DLive's service offerings; solidifying the live streaming giant as one of the largest in the world.

DLive has grown in strides over the past 15 months. The streaming platform boasts a passionate community, a niche product-market fit, and strong adoption has grown to over five million monthly active users. Here is a brief timeline of milestones and achievements from the DLive team:

"DLive is one of the best real-world examples of what is possible when you combine blockchain and digital media," said Justin Sun, CEO of BitTorrent. "DLive is a great solution for live media producers. Think of how valuable live streaming content is already to centralized social media platforms who take ownership and advantage of their users' hard work. We look forward to DLive bringing value to the entire world with the addition of TRON and BitTorrent's global community of passionate creators."

"We are ecstatic to have the opportunity to be part of the BitTorrent ecosystem," said Charles Wayn, CEO of DLive. "I've watched them pioneer the digital peer-to-peer space. DLive's goal of empowering creators and rewarding communities is one step closer with the amplification of this new venture."

By joining the BitTorrent ecosystem, DLive will however support the Lino blockchain until the transition to the TRON blockchain is complete. The Lino blockchain technical infrastructure will be integrated into BitTorrent however LINO coin will no longer be the fundamental unit of value or utilization in the new ecosystem. To facilitate the integration of BTT into the existing DLive ecosystem, DLive expects to offer various benefits and rewards to existing users to transition from the Lino blockchain onto the BitTorrent ecosystem. Once the migration to the TRON blockchain is successfully completed, DLive will no longer utilize the Lino blockchain.

About BitTorrent, Inc.

Founded with a leading peer-to-peer sharing technology standard in 2004, BitTorrent, Inc. is a consumer software company based in San Francisco. Its protocol is the largest decentralized P2P network in the world, driving 22% of upstream and 3% of downstream traffic globally.

Its flagship desktop and mobile products, BitTorrent and Torrent, enable users to send large files over the internet, connecting legitimate third-party content providers with users. With over 100 million active users, BitTorrent products have been installed on over 1 billion devices in over 138 countries worldwide.

SOURCE DLive

https://dlive.tv/

What’s in store for Bitcoin over the next 10 years? – The National

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

Bitcoin investors believe the worlds biggest cryptocurrency is in for material gains in 2020 due to a network quirk.

The halving or sometimes referred to as the halvening, in a nod to the fantasy film and TV franchise Highlander is due on or around May 18 and is the process in which the reward Bitcoin miners receive for creating fresh Bitcoins will be cut in half. Thats by design and has happened twice before. In 2012, when the block reward went from 50 to 25 bitcoins, prices rose nearly 8,200 per cent in a year. The gain in the 18 months after the second halvening in 2016 was more than 2,200 per cent.

The next 10 years need to be a totally different stage of growth based on totally different factors than the first stage.

David Tawil, ProChain Capital

While Bitcoin enthusiasts are keeping the faith in the halvening, the cryptocurrency is one that emerged from the ashes of the financial crisis. Bitcoin was created as a bypass to the banks and government agencies mired in Wall Streets greatest calamity in decades. At first, it was slow to break through, muddied by a slew of scandals: fraud, thefts and scams that turned away many and brought closer regulatory scrutiny. But once it burst into the mainstream, it proved to be the decades best-performing asset.

The largest digital token, trading around $7,200, has posted gains of more than 9 million per cent since July 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Bitcoin really captured that wild technology enthusiasm that this time is different', says Peter Atwater, the president of Financial Insyghts and an adjunct professor at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The performance over the past 10 years, even with its huge run-up and subsequent mega-crash, leaves all others in the dust. Its a massive windfall for those who stuck with it through its ups and downs, even as it continues to provide fodder for get-rich-quick schemes. For some, the never-ending fantasy of continually hitting that payoff still helps to keep Bitcoins momentum going.

Nothing else comes even close to beating it. The S&P 500 merely tripled in that period. An index that tracks world markets has more than doubled. Gold is up 25 per cent. Some of the best-performing stocks in the Russell 3000 including Exact Sciences and Intelligent Systems are each up about 3,000 per cent. Those gains pale in comparison to the finance worlds latest and one of its most controversial marvels.

Partly, the monster return is a reflection of the calculus behind Bitcoins jumping-off point: the token wasnt worth anything when someone named Satoshi Nakamoto launched it on Halloween 2008. Designed as a method of exchange that can be sent electronically between users around the world, it did not have a centralised control network. Bitcoin, instead, is run by a network of computers that keep track of all transactions on the blockchain ledger. For many, that technology was reason enough to buy into the idea.

On the other side of the equation are Bitcoins devoted enthusiasts who saw in its technology a promising way to change the global financial system.

This is the first time that theres a real separation just like church and state you have a separation of money and state, says Alex Mashinsky, founder of Celsius Network, a crypto lending platform. Thats the innovation, thats the excitement.

But Bitcoin was slow to take off, notching its first transaction two years after its creation, when someone used it to buy pizza. Since then, the firstborn tokens price has catapulted, doubling many times over, and hundreds of imitators have cropped up some with more success than others.

Many of those who got in early stayed faithful, watching as it made its way through a boom and bust cycle unrivalled by almost anything else over the last decade.

At the beginning of 2017, Bitcoin jumped above $1,000. By midsummer, it had more than doubled. Insanity was unleashed. By year-end, it hovered above $14,000. But as swiftly as it ran up, it fell even faster. By the end of 2018, Bitcoin barely budged above $3,000. Yet shortly after its crash, it embarked on another huge rally, this time reaching as high as $13,800 in the summer of 2019.

Certainly the numbers are what appeals to investors, says David Tawil, president of ProChain Capital. The next 10 years need to be a totally different stage of growth based on totally different factors than the first stage.

As much as its made a fortune for speculators and some thieves, Bitcoins survival will rest on further adoption. Its not being used as a widespread medium of exchange. A few large retailers are accepting payment in Bitcoin but it hasnt been the large-scale embrace so many had predicted. Scams are still running rampant. Interest is waning and consolidation among large owners is at a higher level than it was during the height of the 2017 bubble, which means that their influence over prices could be increasing.

Projections for the next decade abound. In the 2020s, mass adoption is surely to take off, they say. Blockchain technology will revolutionise and solve every problem in the world. On the other hand, regulatory scrutiny is likely to intensify, with central bankers paying closer attention than ever before.

In the more immediate term, some speculators forecast 2020 might be less fraught with volatility given its upcoming halving, whereby the number of coins awarded to so-called miners who process transactions is cut by 50 per cent. Thats set to happen in May 2020 (the internet is replete with countdown clocks). The coins previous cut, about four years ago, coincided with a run-up in its price, pushing many crypto evangelist to believe in a repeat.

To CoinLists Andy Bromberg, the halving is already priced in. Maybe its been overpriced in and everyones bought into this thesis and we see a dip post-halving, says the firms co-founder and president in an interview. That would not shock me.

But beyond next year, Bitcoin is finding its own narrative as digital gold, he says. It feels like that narrative is picking up steam and its breaking away on its own. I would define success for most crypto assets as doing exactly that.

Updated: January 6, 2020 08:39 AM

Excerpt from:

What's in store for Bitcoin over the next 10 years? - The National

RUON AI upload of SovereignSky ‘space-based blockchain’ – – Enterprise Times

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

SovereignSky has successfully started to upload its BEOS hybrid blockchain to its primary satellite constellation (joining SpaceChainin space). It is currently in space orbit because of a partnership with SpaceQuest launched in December 2018 onboard Elon Musks SpaceX. The purpose: to enable a One World, One Network.

The project is so all-encompassing, it has taken some of the smartest, most visionary minds in blockchain, aerospace, mobile technology, and even science fiction to achieve its grand vision, says Stan Larimer co-founder of RUON AI, BEOS, SovereignSky, Steemit, and Bitshares.

Within a decade, ending extreme world poverty may be possible. One part of this could involve a new, encrypted Wi-Fi network which connects everyone on Earth.

A near indestructible blockchain financial system and global currency would then exist with the attractions that it should be invulnerable to the effects of:

The concept came from SovereignSky/RUON AI Founder Timothy E. Burkes sci-fi space opera Planet X. Yet, what started as a movie premise on a hypervelocity star system far away, is becoming a reality in Earths own solar system with the creation of:

RUON AI (pronounced Are-you-on), with a single patent application, believes its RUON AI solution can scan news sites, blogs, forums, chat rooms and social channels to identify users endangered or affected by war, famine or oncoming natural disasters. The AI creates a database of endangered users. It sends their profiles to HNWs, companies, donors and members of the public who can instantly send electronic currency donations (via SovereignAid and RUON electronic currency) directly to the users before the danger strikes.

SovereignSky and RUON AIs next task is to work with global charities, international agencies, UHNW, VCs, the UN and Fortune 500 companies to distribute SovereignSkys connectivity boxes. These contain:

SovereignAid and RUON electronic currency will then be beamed from donors up to the satellite constellation and directly to places and people in need in economically developing nations and areas without banking or even wi-fi (connecting directing to the portable modems distributed in these areas):

Any user holding a SovereignSky or RUON smartphone will automatically be able to receive a donation to their RUON wallet and can instantly spend the donation on clothes, water, food and medicine using the smart card. Donors can:

The beneficiary and donor can even show and track how each donation is spent via videos, pictures, two-way chat and even double-verification blockchain accounting technology. the result has the potential to be a transparent donation process.

Tim Burke, RUON AI founder, says, The beneficiaries receive donations instantly and can upload photos and videos showing your money being put to good effect. People in need can personally thank donors through the RUON app, and donors can monitor exactly how their donations have been spent. All of this is made possible via blockchain technology, auditing and reporting. We feel its one of the most effective and trusted donation and verification processes ever created, and, today, this solution has been officially captured in one of RUONs patent pending claims. Its time for change. Please contact us and help support our mission.

SovereignSky is a satellite constellation powering its own space-based blockchain. This blockchain is currently uploaded three times daily by SpaceQuest onto SovereignSkys first satellites AprizeSat-5 and THEA.

SovereignSky was co-founded by Stan Larimer (father of Dan Larimer, the creator of EOS) and film producer and science fiction writer/co-director Timothy E. Burke. Strategic partners include:

We are excited to work with SovereignSky on its incredible mission to help eradicate global poverty, and we are on the way to complete one of the first ever blockchain transactions in space onboard the SovereignSky satellite network, says Dino Lorenzini, CEO of SpaceQuest.

SovereignSkys whitepaper includes the World Banks estimates that:

The United States alone donates US$390B per annum to charity (globally it is US$800B). Such numbers indicate how feasible eradicating extreme world poverty is.

The SovereignSky concept of space-based wifi, blockchain, AI and cryptocurrency donations/payments requires some imagination, and faith. Yet, for a positive start to 2020, believing feels better than doubting.

NB: for a video on the concept see Youtube

See more here:

RUON AI upload of SovereignSky 'space-based blockchain' - - Enterprise Times

WEF: blockchain projects need partnerships to succeed in 2020 – Decrypt

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

The World Economic Forum, the NGO dedicated to shaping global, regional, and industry agendas, announced its predictions for the blockchain world on Thursday. For the WEF, 2019 saw a shift from blockchain hype to quality; in the year to come, it predicted that there is an opportunity for blockchain to have a social impact.

Specifically, the WEF expects to see increased experimentation with hybrid blockchain models, taking place in the financial sector through decentralized finance (DeFi) and synthetic central bank digital currencies. In the public sector, it predicted an increased use of smart contracts.

However, theres a catch: Projects will only succeed if there is adequate governance and a collaborative approach, said the WEF.

Duh. But 2019s blockchain companies didnt think of the obvious: Libra, the kind-of-stablecoin network led by Facebook, fell flat on its face in 2019, and world leaders have already pronounced it dead on arrival.

Be the first to get Decrypt Members. A new type of account built on blockchain.

The WEF predicts that blockchain projects must form partnerships in order to succeed. Companies are waking up to the idea that to go far, they ought to go together, it wrote.

By way of an example, the WEF plugged its own consortium that looks at blockchain in the mining and metals sector, where a collaborative approach would have been hard to imagine even a few years ago. It expects such collaborations to continue in the future.

Technology, however, must be supported by strong policy, which is essential to make sure that blockchain is deployed in a way that addresses its limitations.

Read the original here:

WEF: blockchain projects need partnerships to succeed in 2020 - Decrypt

Ticker Tool Uses the BCH Blockchain to Provide Reliable Rate Data – Bitcoin News

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

Instantly verifiable, unhackable and forever retrievable are some of the key features of information stored on a blockchain. These are also the characteristics that traders of various assets, commodities and currencies would appreciate when it comes to the price data they are using. The team behind the Blitz Ticker project have decided thats exactly what they need, too.

Also read: Skrill Now Lets You Swap BTC for BCH

Blitz Tickdata is a platform that aims to become the worlds first rate publisher on blockchain. It tracks crypto, forex, and bullion prices and distributes rates each second onto a P2P network. The service has been operating in testing mode for some time and Blitz has promised its users a beta version but they already have plenty of information available on their website.

The ticker tool provides current and historical data about the price of bitcoin core in U.S. dollars and the rates of other leading cryptocurrencies against BTC, including bitcoin cash (BCH), ethereum (ETH), ripple (XRP), and litecoin (LTC). You can explore rates for a specific period by setting a start and end date and also get daily, weekly and monthly charts through the quick select function.

The task of saving all this information on a blockchain involves a lot of crypto transactions. Blitz have chosen the bitcoin cash (BCH) network to record their timestamped price rates. Transferring BCH is almost instantaneous and often costs less than a U.S. cent which is an advantage over other cryptocurrencies. The low transaction fees on the BCH network have played a role in selecting the blockchain that can do the job for the project.

The real-time rate data is thus encoded into BCH transactions and propagated throughout the world, the team notes. That allows Blitz Ticker to maintain a truly decentralized rate publishing system thats always available to traders and other users. A documentation page explains how the data can be used in other applications as well.

Blitz Ticker uses addresses that map to a separate set of symbols and the rate data is stored in the format OP_RETURN OP_PUSHDATA [TIMESTAMP] OP_PUSHDATA [DATA]. The timestamp is 32bit Unix Time. The document further details how to query data from the platform and provides instructions on how to take advantage of its other features.

The rate publishing tool has been developed by Blitz which unites professionals with extensive experience in both cryptocurrency and traditional finance markets, including the trading of digital assets, mining hardware and hashrate. The company states that its mission is to help entrepreneurs, family funds and private individuals grow and preserve their crypto assets.

Besides Tickdata, Blitz has also created and maintains a network of miners, traders, crypto investors, banks, exchanges, and brokers. They are involved in over-the-counter (OTC) trading with clients and partners in Beijing, Hong Kong and Tokyo. The network offers investment opportunities in three major sectors: mining, exchange and trading. A private fund set up by Blitz is targeting accredited investors ready to invest $100,000 or more in cryptocurrencies.

What do you think about the Blitz Ticker platform using the Bitcoin Cash blockchain? Share your thoughts about it in the comments section below.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not an offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, or a recommendation, endorsement, or sponsorship of any third party products, services, or companies. Bitcoin.com does not provide investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Neither the company nor the author is responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in this article.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, fair use.

Do you want to dig deeper into Bitcoin? Explore past and present cryptocurrency prices through our Bitcoin Markets tool and head to our Blockchain Explorer to view specific transactions, addresses, and blocks.

Lubomir Tassev is a journalist from tech-savvy Bulgaria. Quoting Hitchens, Lubomir says: Being a writer is what I am, rather than what I do. International politics and economics are two other sources of inspiration.

Follow this link:

Ticker Tool Uses the BCH Blockchain to Provide Reliable Rate Data - Bitcoin News

Five ways businesses are investing in blockchain – TechHQ

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

The United States alone is predicted totriple blockchain spendby 2022, from US$1.1 billion this year, to US$4.2 billion in 2022.

Thats because the technology is redefining the tenets of trade in the digital era. It has dispersed to a range of industries, and although the adoption of distributed ledger technology (DLT) is most prevalent in financial sectors; the technology is increasingly gaining a foothold in various other fields, such as providing traceability in the food industry.

As blockchain technology is picked up by various sectors, there is certainly no one-size-fits-all style of implementation. Each business will have its own unique motivation and intent for the technology, and this will influence how it is used and the architecture employed. With that in mind, Gartner experts laid out five approaches businesses are taking to deploy the technology.

While not all businesses may agree to the labels, they serve to show what factors are driving decisions to invest, and how those are impacting end solutions.

One of the fully-centralized blockchain solutions is dubbed Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). In this case, the blockchain system is developed for in-house use and is led by the company itself.

The purpose of these blockchain initiatives is prompted, of course, by the fear of missing out on the digital zeitgeist. These organizations choose to adopt blockchain largely for the sake of adopting it and are looking to achieve the same success as front-runners. However, a lack of planning and a comprehensive understanding of technologys value leads to poor implementation, and often abandonment, of initiatives.

On the one hand, organizations unfamiliar with the technology could consult experts of blockchain pioneers; on the other, attractive blockchain packages may sometimes be too good to be true.

Trojan horse solutions are often packaged nicely. They may have a respected brand behind it, robust technological foundations, and have a reputation for solving expensive, wide-ranging problems in industries. But the catch is, clients are often required to share a portion of the companys data or transfer some control to the main blockchain owner.

In general, the solution is provided by the central organization with superior influence in the implementation of technology such as tech giants, dominant supply-chain groups, or an organization of blockchain developers.The risk in companies adopting this type of blockchain solution is that they become dependent on the providers solutions and are bound to contract terms. Subsequently, the technology owner may exert more control over the companys data and operations.

Companies motivated to seek various approaches to address known and widespread problems, such as flawed systems in record keeping, are regarded as blockchain opportunists

These opportunists choose to develop in-house blockchain solutions to solve existing problems, and are less inclined to approach existing blockchain giants for support. In this context, opportunists experiment on blockchain initiatives and, even if full integration is not possible, the attempt offers an experiential payoff.

Another approach of blockchain takes on a more evolutionary path whereby a solution is designed to develop over time to use tokens independent of centralized governance.

To illustrate, theUnion of European Football Associations (UEFA) is collaborating with several tech companies to combat ticket resell and eliminate illegal broker activities. In order to do so, ticket buyers are encouraged to download an app with all transferred tickets tracked and recorded in a blockchain.

This is an example of the start of an evolutionary blockchain solution, beginning with a centralized body and eventually tapping into the secondary market.

The final archetype of blockchain solutions is developed by innovation-driven groups or startups to launch new markets or disrupt a current business model.

An example of this archetype is Woolf University, a blockchain-inspired initiative with aims to disrupt the traditional education system and create a digital educational society. Woolf University connects professors and students in the platform. Here, blockchain helps protect professors and students data and payment details.

Native blockchain solutions will inject a stream of innovation and creativity into legacy industries.

This list could surely be longer, but it goes some way to present the different kinds of blockchain solutions and approaches available to enterprises. Not approach is necessarily right or wrong, or will be a success or failure it all depends on the company and its needs, and its willingness to experiment and invest in technology which could prove a boon to business, or prove more a lesson learned.

Read the original:

Five ways businesses are investing in blockchain - TechHQ

COSO to Release Guidance on Blockchain for Businesses Aiming to Deploy Tech – Cointelegraph

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) is planning to release guidance on blockchain for companies looking to deploy the technology.

As The Wall Street Journal reported on Dec. 27, COSO an initiative to fight corporate fraud is working on guidance on blockchain to give a better understanding of the tech for businesses that aim to integrate it into their internal processes. COSO expects to release the guidance in the first quarter of 2020.

Specifically, the guidance targets executives in financial services and businesses that use blockchain to improve their supply chains. Paul Sobel, the chairman of COSO, said that he wants to make sure that weve got that properly controlled because it is a very different view of the world when you have distributed ledgers. It isnt something that is contained in your own system.

COSOs guidance is geared to help companies set up internal controls and manage enterprise-wide risks. According to Sobel, the organization hopes that its frameworks will push executives and board members to start a dialogue about what their oversight responsibilities are.

A November study by Juniper Research revealed that blockchain technology, in combination with Internet of Things sensors and trackers, will greatly reduce retailers costs by streamlining supply chains, while simplifying regulatory compliance, offering more efficient food recalls, and tackling fraud.

That same month, news broke that measured by patent applications in the sector, China was handily outpacing other countries including the United States in blockchain technology. At the time, the U.S., China, Japan, South Korea and Germany together submitted around 12,000 blockchain-related patent applications through 2018, with China accounting for over 60% of the five-country total.

A study by American market intelligence firm IDC projected that Chinas spending on blockchain technology will exceed $2 billion in 2023.

More here:

COSO to Release Guidance on Blockchain for Businesses Aiming to Deploy Tech - Cointelegraph

The racist reality for migrants seeking a new life in Europe – The Times

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

For many exiles fleeing war or persecution in the Middle East, the European dream has become a nightmare of alienation and bureaucracy. By Oliver Moody

The Times,January 2 2020, 5:00pm

The Swedish bank cashier wrinkled her nose with displeasure when Ghayath Almadhoun presented his refugees identity pass. How do you have this? she said. Youre not allowed this. She tossed his bank card back across the counter.

Fuming, he went outside and plugged it into a cash machine, only to discover that the card was blocked. The cashier had frozen his account on a whim.

Life in Europe is often cast as the fulfilment of a dream for the millions of Arab migrants like Mr Almadhoun who have travelled west over the past decade.

Long before the 2015 migrant crisis, more than 200,000 people a year sought refuge in the EU, many of them fleeing war or persecution in the Middle East.

Sweden granted permanent

Want to read more?

Subscribe now and get unlimited digital access on web and our smartphone and tablet apps, free for your first month.

See the original post here:

The racist reality for migrants seeking a new life in Europe - The Times

A Translation Crisis at the Border – The New Yorker

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

Oswaldo Vidal Martn always wears the same thing to court: a striped overshirt, its wide collar and cuffs woven with geometric patterns and flowers. His pants are cherry red, with white stripes. Martn is Guatemalan and works as a court interpreter, so clerks generally assume that he is there to translate for Spanish speakers. But any Guatemalan who sees his clothing, which is called traje tpico, knows that Martn is indigenous. My Spanish is more conversational, Martn told me. I still have some difficulties with it. He interprets English for migrants who speak his mother tongue, a Mayan language called Mam.

Martn, who came to the United States with his parents in 1999, when he was four, was studying to be an engineer when the trickle of Mam speakers migrating to the Oakland area, where he lives, turned into a flood. In 2014, some sixty thousand unaccompanied minors crossed into the United States, in what President Barack Obama called an actual humanitarian crisis on the border. A local immigration lawyer told me that at least forty per cent of the children and teen-agers arriving in the Bay Area were Mam. Martn trained with a nonprofit in San Francisco called Asociacin Mayabwhich offers workshops in translation for indigenous-language speakersand then began interpreting. There is bottomless demand. I could do it three, four, five days a week, Martn, who also works for his fathers construction company, told me. Every day.

One morning in early December, Martn was interpreting for a criminal case in Dublin, east of Oakland. A clerk signed him inBuenos das, she greeted himand then he met the people hed be translating for, a Mam husband and wife who had been the victims of an attempted home burglary. Through Martn, the couple sought reassurance from the judge that their immigration status wouldnt be questioned.

Martn accompanied the husband to the witness box, while the wife waited in a nearby room. Watching a skilled simultaneous interpreter is a bit like watching someone speaking in tongues. As soon as the judge starts talking, the interpreter mutters along, not waiting for the sentence to be over before beginning to translate. Martn relayed the witnesss answers in a low, steady voice, in American-accented English.

The testimony turned on the layout of the kitchen. There are twenty-two officially recognized Mayan languages in Guatemala; all of them use relational nouns instead of prepositionsMam uses head to say on top ofand they have complex grammatical rules to describe bodies in space. The witness pinched his fingers and dropped them down to imitate his wife putting cash in her purse. He worked his eyebrows. He didnt look up when the prosecutor asked a question. He was telling his story to Martn, the only person in the room who understood.

When his wife emerged and was asked to spell her name, she looked at the ground and whispered in Mam, I will not be able to spell my name. I did not go to school to learn how. But she warmed to Martn, glancing over at him as she became more comfortable.

The prosecutor asked, What is your primary language?

The same language Im using now, she said. I only know a little bit of Spanish. She does not speak English at all.

During the lunch break, Martn and I went out for burritos. In line, a man in a baseball cap approached. You are doing a great job in there, he said. Martn looked at him, confused. The man lifted his cap. Im the judge!

Guatemala has a population of fifteen million people, forty per cent of them indigenous, according to the most recent census. In the past year, two hundred and fifty thousand Guatemalan migrants have been apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border. At least half of them are Mayans, and many speak little or no Spanish. According to the Department of Justice, Mam was the ninth most common language used in immigration courts last year, more common than French. Three Guatemalan Mayan languages made the top twenty-five: Mam, Kiche, and Qanjobal.

The Bay Area is unusual in that Mam-speaking asylum seekers may be able to access in-person court interpretation. The vast majority of indigenous-language interpretation in the U.S. is done over the phone, by for-profit companies such as Lionbridge and S.O.S. International. Credibility is an official factor in a judges assessment of an asylum claim, and much can be lost on the phone. The quality of telephone interpretation also varies wildly. Martn says that he took the exam to become a Lionbridge translator, and, to test the company, invented extra material, a cardinal sin for translators. He passed anyway. (Lionbridge declined to comment.)

The U.S. government claims to provide proper translation at all points in the immigration process, but, in practice, it rarely offers Mayan-language translation at the border or in holding cells. (A spokesperson from Customs and Border Protection said, We use a third-party translation service via telephone when we are unable to communicate due to language barriers. We do our best to make sure we can communicate accurately, with everyone, throughout their time in our custody.) Until just a few years ago, there was a tendency to treat Mayan languages as dialects. A former immigration judge told me that all her Mayan-language cases, when they came from Customs and Border Protection, were listed on the court docket as Spanish. When Mayan-language asylum seekers can manage some Spanish, it is often not enough to navigate credible-fear interviewsin which migrants must explain why they are afraid of returning to their home countries.

Between April and June, 2018, the Trump Administration adopted a zero-tolerance policy, intended to deter migration at the southern border. As part of the policy, parents were forcibly separated from their children. That July, Martn got a call from Asociacin Mayab. Lawyers at the border were looking for Mam speakers to translate for detained migrant families. Martn travelled to the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center, in McAllen, Texas, which became notorious for holding children in cages made of chain-link fencing. He ended up translating for a migrant named Mario Perez Domingo, who spoke barely any Spanish, according to his lawyer, Efrn Olivares, of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Domingo and his two-year-old daughter had been picked up by a Border Patrol agent who asked for their papers and then accused Domingo of forging his daughters birth certificate. The agent asked in Spanish if he had paid for the certificate, and Domingo said yes, because Guatemalans pay a small fee to the civil registry for birth certificates. The Border Patrol argued that Domingo had bought it on the black market and that the child was not his daughter, and took her away. (BuzzFeed reported on this separation.)

Domingo didnt have the language skills to explain. Not even Olivares, his lawyer, could fully understand what had happened. During Domingos criminal hearing, he was given only a Spanish-language translator. On the stand, he kept talking about a son who had been taken away. But he didnt have a son, he had a daughter, Olivares said.

By the time Martn got involved, Domingo had been transferred from McAllen, so they talked on the phone. In fewer than five minutes, Martn had the facts of the case. I asked if Domingo spoke Spanish. Not to the point where he could really explain himself or be able to understand what was going on, Martn said.

I asked if language was a factor in the separation, and Martn said, Definitely. Martn is generally unflappable, but an edge of anger came through. They know that they can get away with it. The father was reunited with his daughter only after taking a DNA test, a month later, and then both were released.

Extended detentions or deportations caused by mistranslation or lack of translation are not rare. A former volunteer at the South Texas Family Residential Center, in Dilley, Texas, the nations largest immigrant-detention center, told me that cases can turn on the difference between competent and incompetent translation. A mother held there told non-Guatemalan interpreters that she had had trouble in Guatemala because of her blouses, which sounds innocuous in English. She meant her huipil, a handwoven blouse worn by Mayans. She was saying that she was persecuted for being indigenous, but the interpreter didnt understand or explain. The womans claim was rejected, and she was deported.

According to a filing by the A.C.L.U. last August, a father accused of a crime was separated from his son without a Qeqchi translator present. During the six-month separation, the child began to forget his familys native language, and he suffered extreme isolation because of his inability to speak Spanish, English, or any language common in the shelter, according to the filing. Another boy was separated due to fathers alleged mental health problems; child advocates later determined fathers indigenous language may led [sic] to wrong mental health concern. By the time U.S. authorities acknowledged that there was no mental-health problem, they had deported the father.

Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U., which brought a lawsuit to stop the child separations, told me that, of more than five thousand parents separated from their children, at least eight hundred were deported without them. A significant number of those were indigenous, Gelernt said. His team found that half were Guatemalan, and that ten to twenty per cent were from indigenous-majority departments, such as San Marcos, Huehuetenango, and Quich. (Children were taken from their parents before the zero-tolerance policy took effect, and about eleven hundred have been taken since it was ruled unlawful.) The indigenous population was likely the least able to understand their rights, and may therefore have been more susceptible to losing their children and waiving away their own asylum rights, Gelernt said.

Both Olivares and Gelernt believe that the system denies basic rights to Spanish-speaking asylum seekers as well, but that difficulties are exacerbated for Mayan-language speakers. The language barrier contributed, at least in part, to a lot of those separations, Olivares said.

Then there are the deaths. Kids dying on the border are Mayan, Naomi Adelson, the interpreter who trained Martn at Asociacin Mayab, told me. Six children have died in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security since Donald Trump took office. Five were indigenous. Jakelin Caal Maqun, a seven-year-old Qeqchi girl, had a fever that spiked on a long bus ride from the New Mexico desert, where she was picked up with her father, to a Border Patrol detention center. She died from a bacterial infection that led to multiple-organ failure after she received no medical care for ninety minutes. Felipe Gmez Alonzo, an eight-year-old Chuj boy, died of the flu as he and his father were shuttled between holding centers. President Trump placed blame for the deaths on the childrens fathers, who had signed intake waivers stating that their children did not need medical care. The waivers were in English, and officials provided a verbal Spanish translationtwo languages that the fathers did not speak fluently or at all.

Mayan Guatemalans have a persistent problem: explaining to people that they still exist. The ancient Mayan cities collapsed in the eighth or ninth century, but the Mayan people remained, farming corn in small towns. One archeologist compared it to the fall of the Soviet Union: the structure of life has changed, but the people are still there. All the Mayan languages share a common root, but most of them are mutually unintelligible. Yucatec Mayan is tonal, like Cantonese. Kiche, the language of the Popol Vuh, has six or ten vowels, depending on the dialect. Mam is produced far back in the mouth and comes out softly raspy. The variations are not a mark of being cut off from external influences, the linguist William Hanks told me, but, rather, a sign of development. Mayan languages have had four thousand years to ramify. Mayans have never been isolated, Hanks said. In 1990, the Academy of Mayan Languages of Guatemala was formed, and a branching linguistics tree, showing the common origin of all Mayan languages, became a symbol of the Pan-Mayan movement. (Mam emerged from the trunk about two thousand years ago.) There is still debate about which subdivisions should be counted as dialects. (A chestnut in the field of linguistics: A language is a dialect with an army.) The introduction to the Academys official Mam-Spanish dictionary reads, Language is the backbone of the culture and cosmovision of a people.

Last summer, I visited Martns home town, Todos Santos Cuchumatn, in the lofty pine mountains near the border with Mexico, one of the coldest parts of the highlands. To get there, I drove through seven distinct language groups in two days. On the mountaintop just before the descent into the valley of Todos Santos, there is no running waterwomen fetch it from wells with plastic jugs. Suddenly, you start seeing men in cherry-red striped pants watering their vegetable patches.

Nearly everyone in Guatemala has some Mayan heritage, but the indigenous are considered a separate group, identified by language, place of origin, and, for women, colorful clothing woven on backstrap looms. (In Todos Santos, the men, too, wear traje.) Mayan people tend to be much poorer than non-indigenous Guatemalans, the result of a long history of oppression and land theft.

Some Central American migrants to the U.S. have adopted the slogan of the post-colonial immigrants-rights campaigns in Europe, from the nineteen-eighties: We are here because you were there. In 1954, the C.I.A. backed a coup that overthrew a President who was overseeing land-reform measures that included expropriating United Fruits holdings. The coup led to a civil war that lasted from 1960 to 1996, during which Marxist-Leninist guerrilla groups tried to topple a series of U.S.-backed governments and dictatorships. In the early eighties, the Guatemalan Army believedoften wronglythat Mayans were susceptible to guerrilla ideology. Soldiers pillaged indigenous communities, raped women and girls, and stole children who survived massacres, putting hundreds up for adoption. (Guerrilla fighters also attacked Mayans whom they believed were informing for the Army.) The Army burned houses and churches as well as cornfieldssacred sources of sustenance for Mayans. Two hundred thousand people died during the war, the Western Hemispheres bloodiest conflict of the twentieth century; eighty-three per cent of them were indigenous.

In Todos Santos, which was then a small cluster of adobe houses, the Army openly massacred Mam families, intending to terrorize the population. American Green Berets helped train a special-forces unit called the kaibiles, named for a Mam leader who had evaded capture by Spanish conquistadors. This unit committed the worst atrocities of the war. A Mam man told an anthropologist that, in 1982, soldiers captured an accused guerrilla fighter and summoned the people of Todos Santos to the town square. A soldier cut the man open from his neck to his belly. Then he took out the liver of the poor man, the witness said. He grabbed the liver out, and he ate it just like that, in front of the soldiers, in front of the people. We did not understand. After the war, a U.N.-backed truth commission found that the Guatemalan government had committed genocidal acts against Mayan communities.

Interpreters a generation older than Martn told me that, when they work on asylum cases, they must confront their own traumatic memories. One man translated for a woman who had been separated from her son at the border. He said that it was living my experience all over again. The woman described how her son had been pulled from her arms. At first, he was screaming. Then he began hyperventilating, and couldnt get a sound out. Then the guards took him away.

When the interpreter was ten years old, his mother was kidnapped by the Army. It was Sunday. I had climbed up into a tree to play with kites. My aunt came out. Shes one of those people with a strong personality, who doesnt tell you things calmly, he recalled. And she said, Come down out of there. They have taken your mom.

Despite the genocide, asylum status was hard to come by in the U.S., because Guatemalans were fleeing a regime that was supported by millions of dollars of U.S. military aid each year. In 1982, during the height of state terror, President Ronald Reagan met with the Guatemalan dictator Efran Ros Montt, who was later convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. (The sentence was overturned shortly afterward, under political pressure.) Reagan praised Ros Montts progressive efforts and said that he was getting a bum rap on human rights.

Indigenous people fared little better after the signing of peace agreements, in 1996. The country was opened to international mining and to palm-oil corporations, which have steadily encroached on indigenous land, forcing families to move to Guatemala City. Irma Alicia Velsquez Nimatuj, a Kiche anthropologist and a public intellectual, wrote in the Guatemalan newspaper El Peridico, The urban children, cornered into selling on street corners, were left choosing between an education for the poor that could only provide them with a survival-level job, or joining the gangs. Interpreters told me that racism and even violent discrimination are such ingrained features of Guatemalan life that some Mayan asylum seekers dont think to mention them in credible-fear interviews. They have plenty of other reasons to flee: gangs, death squads, domestic violence and femicide, disillusionment with a series of corrupt Presidents, and climate change, which is drying out cornfieldsa spiritual as well as an environmental crisis. Guatemalans confound the distinction between economic migrants and the types of persecution that the U.S. requires to grant asylum.

Martn waits outside a courthouse in San Francisco. During asylum interviews, he picks up important terms to include in a Mam-English legal dictionary that he is compiling.

Today, Todos Santos is a tangle of remittance houses, several stories tall, built of concrete block, with columns and fanciful towers, blue reflective windows, American and Guatemalan flags painted along the trim, and ears of corn strung out to dry on balconies. Most of the houses remain unfinished, with fingers of rebar reaching up from the top floor. Migrants send back money in installments and build floor by floor, until they decide to come home or are deported. The town runs on remittances: a store selling pens and paper is called Librera California, and coyote services are available for Spanish and Mam speakers. In the cemetery just outside town, on the day I was there, a large family was visiting. The sonthe only family member who spoke Spanishpointed to the raised graves, which are painted red, white, and blue, and told me, Those are the ones who died up there. The graves were decorated with plastic flowers and offerings of bottles of water with the caps unscrewed.

Mara Martn (no relation to Oswaldo) is the single staff member in Todos Santos of CONAMIGUA, a Guatemalan government agency that works with migrants and retornados, a local euphemism for the deported. Her office is in the town hall, where posters warning against migration are captioned This message was sponsored by the U.S. Embassy. Martn told me that CONAMIGUAs recent efforts to dissuade migrants included a radio spot in Mam with marimba music. She translated the ad: Here in Todos Santos Cuchumatn you can excel if you stay and start studying. The trip to the North is very risky and you could encounter death, and then your family would have to suffer and cry.

Martn admitted that her job is nearly impossible. In her spare time, she volunteers with a group that provides free translation via phone for Mam-speaking migrants in the U.S.

Other people in town work for the for-profit phone-translation services. The wife of a pharmacist who moonlights as an interpreter says that her husband is constantly getting calls from the border in the middle of the night. Oswaldo Martn said that the services lowball translatorsthey offered him forty-five cents a minute for highly skilled workbut pay that is low in Oakland is high in Todos Santos.

Most people from town who leave for the U.S. try to make it to Fruitvale, the part of Oakland where Martn lives. Pedro Pablo Solares, a specialist in migration and a columnist for the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre, travelled throughout the U.S. between 2010 and 2014, providing legal services to migrants. He found that the immense majority of Mayans were living in what he called ciudades espejomirror citieswhere migrants from the same small towns in Guatemala have reconstituted communities in the U.S. If you are a member of the Chuj community and that is your language, there are only fifty thousand people who speak that in the world. Theres only so many places you can go to find people who speak your language, Solares told me. He described the migration patterns like flight routes: Qanjobal speakers from San Pedro Solom go to Indiantown, Florida; Mam speakers from Tacan go to Lynn, Massachusetts; Jakalteco speakers from Jacaltenango go to Jupiter, Florida.

I grew up my entire life speaking Mam, and there is no word for asylum, Henry Sales, a twenty-seven-year-old immigrant from San Juan Atitn, told me. Sales and Oswaldo Martn were at the CsarE. Chvez branch of the public library, in downtown Fruitvale, where they met with other Mam speakers to work on a Mam-English legal dictionary. Sales, who came to the U.S. a decade ago, has jobs at several libraries, translates in immigration court, assists a linguistics Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, and gives Mam classes. He has a radiant smile and tends to dress formally, down to his shined shoes.

Martn had the idea for the legal dictionary when he came across a Mayan health handbook, which listed ailments in English, Spanish, Kiche, and Mam. Translation isnt just words to words; its about expressing whole ways of experiencing the world. There has been a long-running debate in Guatemala about whether non-indigenous doctors should be trained to diagnose and treat xibrikilel susto, in Spanishfright or spirit attack, a common illness among Mayans that can involve symptoms ranging from depression to diarrhea and anemia. According to Mayan cosmology, the malady can be caused by violent events, or by the appearance of a restless soul who has died in a traumatic way and is unable to find peace.

Sales and Martn speak different dialects of Mam. Though they understand each other, Martn said that Saless Mam sounds more like Frenchairy, with swallowed consonantswhile his is more like Portuguesechoppy and guttural. Even I can hear the difference. In addition to the legal dictionary, Sales and Martn want to provide workshops in various dialects for Mam translators. The U.S. government does not offer certification tests for Mam interpretersMartn said that he had once been challenged by an opposing lawyer for not being certifiedand Sales and Martn believe that learning more dialects could further professionalize Mam interpreters.

They take notes during asylum interviews and court cases, in order to include important terms in the dictionary: credible fear, release, gangs, stipulate, persecution. What weve been doing is try to come up with a definition of asylum and translate that to Mam, Sales said.

Their shorthand translation is To be held and looked after by the law. Qlet tun ley.

A longer, more complete definition that Sales teaches in Mam class is Jun uj tun tkleti tij qa xjal aj kyaj tun tkub tbyon ay bix qa tkawali tux txuli/tchmili.

A paper that saves/protects you from people who are harming/attempting to kill you and your children, your wife/husband.

I asked Sales and Martn if Mam speakers generally understood their explanation of asylum, and Martn said yes, but he mentioned another problem cited by nearly everyone I interviewed. A tendency for a lot of indigenous people is to agree to everything being asked of them in Spanish, he said, even if its incorrect and self-incriminating. A lot of times they get deported, Sales said. Marianne Richardson, a graduate student at the University of Texas, studies access to indigenous languages at the border in Arizona, where many Mayan migrants cross. She told me that, often, when the Border Patrol asks a migrant if he or she speaks Spanish, the person will just say S. And theyll be, like, O.K., can I continue in Spanish? And the person says, S. But theres not really a comprehension check. She added, Some of them are really intimidated by an authority figure with a gun and just want to do what theyre told.

Sales said, We have been taught that, if we dont speak Spanish, we are stupid. He said that, when he first went to school in Guatemala and didnt speak any Spanish, I couldnt defend myself. The other kids would say he was dumb, and he just answered, Yes, yes, without understanding. It happened five hundred years ago, he said. They came and told us, You are savages.

San Franciscos immigration court convenes in an unmarked skyscraper in the financial district. On an August morning, a list of the names for the days cases was tacked onto the wall of a waiting room: Manzares, Martnez, Mendoza, Misa. Eleni Wolfe-Roubatis, the director of Immigrant Legal Defense, a nonprofit, told me that about thirty per cent of the courts cases involve Mam speakers, but they are hard to pick out. Unlike other Mayan groups, which have distinctive last names, Mam speakers were named after Spanish people whom they worked for as semi-enslaved peons. A common last name among Mam people is Pablo, for former peons of a certain Don Pablo.

In a courtroom handling family cases, children were scrambling over the furniture and crying. Some migrants didnt have a lawyer, but every case involved an interpreter. The judge, Scott Gambill, told the room, All these family units have to be heard in a given time. This is a high priority for the Attorney General. In 2018, then Attorney General Jeff Sessions imposed strict quotas and performance metrics to speed up immigration reviews. Sessions announced that family-unit cases were to be heard within a year. Critics saw the move as a way of deporting more people, faster. The change meant that judges were required to rule on at least seven hundred cases per year, which the National Association of Immigration Judges has said impinges on due process.

Judge Gambill repeatedly told asylum seekers and lawyers that he was sorry their court dates were so soon. The speed gave the proceedings a feeling of hitting a language barrier even when there wasnt one. The judge mentioned riders several times before I understood that he meant children.

The days session was intended to set future court dates and check if asylum seekers had changed their address. Migrants tend to move frequently, and if they miss a notice to appear they are ordered deported. One of the asylum seekers was a woman in an elaborately flowered traje, with a hot-pink smartphone tucked into the sash. Did she speak Spanish? the judge asked. Her lawyer, Alexandra Bachan, said, Shes going to identify herself, but beyond that... She made the gesture for so-so.

Leonel Pablo, a young man with gelled hair, ripped jeans, and spotless white sneakers, was in court without a lawyer. The judge asked, through a Spanish-language interpreter, Do you want a Mam translator? Pablo looked confused. Then he said, S, and was quiet.

During a break, Bachan stepped outside with Pablo. When they returned, Bachan told Gambill, Im probably crazy, but Im taking the case.

Delightfully crazy, the judge answered. You are stepping into the gap. The whole asylum request would have to be assembled and argued in three months. Pablo was alone in court that day, but his riderhis eight-year-old son, Hugowas part of his family unit.

Pablo told me in broken Spanish that he had tried to secure a lawyer: I call, but they are all busy. On finding Bachan, he said, Estoy muy agradecido con mi Diosito lindo, a very Guatemalan way of saying that he was thankful to his sweet God. He had come to court that day planning to represent himself in a language he could barely speak.

From court, I walked to the office of Ilyce Shugall, at the Bar Association of San Francisco, where she runs the Immigrant Legal Defense Program. Shugall was sworn in as an immigration judge in 2017 but stepped down last March. She wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times explaining that, under Sessionss immigration rules, she could no longer guarantee that asylum seekers had the opportunity to fully present their cases. (In January, 2019, access to asylum was further restricted, when the Trump Administration began to require that many asylum seekers remain in Mexico while waiting for the disposition of their cases.)

I asked Shugall whether indigenous asylum seekers got due process. She let out a big sigh. Sometimes, she said, and paused. They were definitely the most challenging for me as an immigration judge. She explained that the accelerated schedule has disproportionately affected rare-language speakers.

I wasnt going to give short shrift to people who clearly werent understanding things, Shugall said. It was just really time-consuming, and I know not all judges do that.

Shugall worried less about Mam speakerssince groups such as Asociacin Mayab can sometimes provide interpretersthan about the Kiche and Qanjobal speakers who work as day laborers in the Central Valley. If you speed up their case, it just doesnt give them as much time to find various resources, like people who can help them with language, and then find counsel, and get the documentation they need from their village, she said.

I found it incredible that people who come from remote villages in Guatemala, do not read or write Spanish or English, do not speak Spanish, and are living in rural Central Valley, California, with no transportation, make it to San Francisco for their hearings, Shugall said. As long as you have the proper language interpreter at their final hearing, that is the culmination of everything, and they have an opportunity to speak in their language and tell their story, which Im sure is very gratifying for them in many ways, to finally be able to explain to someone in great detail why they are where they are right now.

One Saturday, I attended a Mam class that Henry Sales teaches at Laney College, in downtown Oakland. It was Labor Day weekend, but thirty people showed up, a mixture of social workers and public-school teachers. Dave Rose, a teacher at Fremont High School, said that he has a total of a hundred and forty students. Sixty of them speak Mam, he said. The other teachers gasped.

Soon Sales was running us through the alphabet. The letters were familiar but the sounds were not. There were glottal stops (as in uh-oh), and apostrophes that made a little popping noise out of the preceding consonant. We could barely get out chjonte, thank you.

Sales showed us how to pronounce tz, a hard buzz. Its not in the books, but our elders say the sounds are from the sounds of forests and animals, hesaid.

Rose wanted to know how to say Youre late. Yaj matzuli. Im going to use that a lot, he said.

During a break from pronunciation drills, Sales gave some background on Mayan culture. I dont call myself Latino or Hispanic, he said. No offense to them. But the Spanish have been the enemy. Sales told us about the biggest event of the year in Todos Santos Cuchumatn, a horse-riding festival that commemorates an anti-colonial rebellion. The ancestors saw horses for the first time when they were enslaved by the Spanish, Sales said. They danced, as an offering, before stealing the horses and escaping into the Cuchumatn Mountains.

The festival is a major holiday for the Mam. Men wear hats with feathers, to represent roosters and a masculine spirit, and gallop through town, past onlookers and marimba bands. Martn told me that he rode in it for the first time in November. It was his first trip to Guatemala in twelve years. He visited family in Todos Santos, and began to set up partnerships to teach Bay Area interpreters various Mam dialects via Skype.

The trip turned out to be an education in what Martn called Mam modalities and etiquette, a way of being that is subtly different from that of Californians. I would describe Mam etiquette as addressing everyone in the room and not taking up space, he said. Im here, but Im not here for meits for you.

Read the original post:

A Translation Crisis at the Border - The New Yorker

Terrorism, Brexit, and the Migrant Crisis: Three Stories That Defined the Decade – Breitbart

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

Three deeply intertwined stories that drove political and social change this decade, and in time may come to define European political history of the 2010s terrorism, Brexit, and the migrant crisis.

The most politically turbulent decade for Europe since the end of the Cold War is drawing to a close but what will these ten years be remembered for?

It has certainly been a difficult time, if not the most difficult yet, for the European Union. The early years of the decade were dominated by the Unions enforced policy of ultra-austerity on its southern members, particularly Greece. Suspicion at the disregard the Union appeared to treat the citizens of some nations with after Greece was later reinforced when the European Union installed its own technocratic government in Italy in 2011, after the government of the day hadnt played by Brussels rules.

Following the collapse of the elected government of Silvio Berlusconi, Brussels made a former European Commissioner the Italian Prime Minister, creating the first of three EU-backed technocratic Italian governments. These moves and others continue to linger in the minds of Eurosceptics across the continent years later.

Yet perhaps even greater developments may colour memories of the decade the deadly terror attacks striking against European cities and peoples, the decision of one European politician to unilaterally declare the continent open to mass migration, and the all-consuming debate on Britains withdrawal that hasnt even happened yet.

As we enter a new decade, events that define the last:

The Migrant Crisis

RIGONCE, SLOVENIA OCTOBER 23: Migrants are escorted through fields by police as they are walked from the village of Rigonce to Brezice refugee camp on October 23, 2015 in Rigonce,, Slovenia. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Future historians may well remember the 2010s ironically as the Wir schaffen das or we can do it decade. This phrase, uttered by Germanys Angela Merkel in 2015 was in response to criticism that already prodigiously generous Germany not doing enough to help migrants.

That, and the expressions of Germanys so-called Welcome-culture were interpreted as an open invitation by many so many, in fact, that over a million illegal migrants and refugees are known to have crossed into Europe in just one year, with over 800,000 of them crossing into the continent by sea.

Germany opened her borders to all comers in 2015, de facto throwing the borders of Europe open unilaterally, and in doing so triggered the Europe Migrant Crisis. The summers news was of the enormous suffering caused by Angela Merkels carelessness the thousands killed on unseaworthy boats sent by ruthless human-traffickers making the most of her largess to make quick money and of great columns of people marching north.

While in a sane world the migrant crisis shouldnt have been possible, a combination of factors including the European Unions much-vaunted but now discredited open borders scheme and Germany suspending the EU laws which were designed to prevent migrants crossing the continent looking for the most generous country rather than the first safe one, meant it was.

At times, the through-flow of migrants heading north through the Balkan route and central Europe was so great the number of illegals being waved through national borders was tens of thousands every single day.

While some countries opened their borders, others resisted being co-opted into Germanys mass migration scheme. Hungary, one of the last stops on the way north and a key road and rail hub for illegals heading to Germany saw up to 10,000 migrants a day in mid-2015, but the completion of their southern border fence in October of that year saw daily arrivals suddenly fall to pre-crisis levels, more or less overnight.

Registered, known illegal immigration to Hungary fell from 391,000 in 2015 to just 1,184 in 2017.

As the left in Europe mourns the end of a decade which saw the collapse of their political movements and the rise of the populist right across Europe, it is worth noting far-sighted left-politicians foresaw what damage to their own credibility the migrant crisis would do. European Commission vice president Frans Timmermans who isstill in post and these days delights in meddling with the Brexit process warned in 2015 that unless the establishment could find sustainable solutions to the migrant crisis, there would be a surge of right-wing populism across Europe.

Terrorism

TOPSHOT Authorites inspect a truck that had sped into a Christmas market in Berlin, on December 19, 2016, killing at least nine people and injuring dozens more.Ambulances and heavily armed officers rushed to the area after the driver drove up the pavement of the market in a square popular with tourists, in scenes reminiscent of the deadly truck attack in the French city of Nice last July. / AFP / Odd ANDERSEN (Photo credit should read ODD ANDERSEN/AFP via Getty Images)

The 2010s for Europe was a decade pock-marked by the horror of radical Islamist terror, with a large number of high-profile, high-casualty attacks visited upon its cities and people, and dozens more intercepted by the security services before they could come to fruition.

Indeed, the decade began with an attempted attack fortunately for its intended target, failed on January 1st 2010, when a Somali migrant armed with an axe tried to kill Danish artist Kurt Westergaard in his home. The motivation for the attack is one now all too familiar in Europe Mr Westergaard had drawn a cartoon of the Islamic prophet Mohammed.

Later, nearly the entire editorial magazine of a French satirical magazine were gunned down in their own offices during a weekly meeting. Again, their crime had been to be undiscriminating in their lampooning, having made as much fun of Mohamed as of any other prophet or god. The vast majority of European mainstream media outlets chose to be cowed by the attacks rather than stand in solidarity with the dead, refusing to publish the images the men and women of Charlie Hebdo had been murdered for.

More attacks followed, and at an accelerating pace as the decade wore on. 2013 introduced Europe to a new kind of terror when a pair of Islamist converts rammed their car into a soldier on a London street and attempted to decapitate him with kitchen knives. While the name of Drummer Lee Rigby lives on, the car-knife attack became the weapon of choice for Islamist killers this decade and is now better known to ordinary people across Europe. Requiring no complex planning or acquiring illegal weapons or explosives, the method was promoted by the Islamic State themselves as ideal for killing the unbelievers.

While many terror attacks against Europe were perpetrated by so-called homegrown radicals arguably a product of the doctrine of multiculturalism encouraging balkanised communities going their own way, rather than pulling together and integrating into national cultures this has not always been the case. The gunman at the 2014 Jewish Museum attack had fought in the Syrian civil war before coming to Europe, and some of the attackers in the 2015 Bataclan massacre in which 131 were killed with Yugoslavian AK47-clones and explosives had also fought in Syria, thought to have entered Europe while posing as refugees during the migrant crisis.

Taking the automobile method to its logical conclusion, 2016 saw two truck attacks, using the largest and deadliest vehicles on the road to kill the largest number of Europeans. In the French city of Nice on their national day, a Tunisian migrant drove a rented 19-ton truck into crowds enjoying a seafront promenade party. Driving at over 50 miles an hour, 86 were killed.

This was followed up months later when a failed asylum seeker who too had come to Europe on a migrant boat murdered the Polish driver of a semi-truck and used the hijacked vehicle to drive through the Berlin Christmas market, killing 11.

The late part of the decade also saw a string of attacks in the United Kingdom. There was a vehicle-knife attack in Westminster in March 2017 which culminated in a police officer being stabbed to death inside the British Parliaments own walls, and the Manchester arena bombing which targeted children and their parents as they left an Ariana Grande concert which killed 22 and injured over 800.

Then London was revisited with another vehicle-knife attack at London Bridge later that year, where eight died. The scene would be targeted a second time in 2019 with yet another attack as a recently released extremist went on a knife rampage before being subdued by members of the public armed with improvised weapons.

The routine responses to these attacks has, too, become part of the grim background of European urban life in the 2010s the inevitable Love [insert city name] posters, teddy bears and tealights. Anti-terrorism barriers and police officers dressed like military special forces are now an apparently permanent feature of our streets. But as London mayor Sadiq Khan likes to point out, its all part and parcel of living in a big city.

Brexit

WESTERHAM, ENGLAND JUNE 23: Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP and Vote Leave campaigner holds up the Daily Express as he returns to his home after buying newspapers of the United Kingdom on June 23, 2016 in Westerham, England. The United Kingdom is going to the polls to decide whether or not the country wishes to remain within the European Union. (Photo by Mary Turner/Getty Images)

If the 2010s were the Brexit decade, then Nigel Farage must have been the man of the decade. What other individual can claim to have had such a profound and widely felt impact on the whole continent in the past ten years quite apart from how it has utterly dominated British politics, Brexit has near totally paralysed the European Union itself.

Every major European summit for years has been consumed by Brexit discussion, repeated Brexit deadlines and the false sense of urgency that always accompanies the down-to-the-wire negotiations Brussels runs on have run roughshod over every other concern. Most frustrated by this has clearly been Frances Emmanuel Macron, who clearly saw his domestic rise to power as an insignificant stepping stone on his mission to totally reform Europe.

Hence his being by far the keenest European leader to get Britain out of Europeas soon as possible if his poll ratings are anything to go by his time as French president are numbered and with that his chance to make his mark on history. This is all great news for the actual people of Europe, of course, who might take the view the less Eurocrats in Brussels are capable of actually doing the happier and easier their day to day lives can be.

Brexit itself had been on the slow-boil for decades, the nascent Eurosceptic movement having all but vanished in 1973 after the county voted to stay in the European community on the basis of a pack of half-truths from then Prime-Minister Ted Heath who withheld the truth he knew about the future direction of Europe getting a kick-start with the Maastricht treaty in 1992. Signing the European Union into existence, the push by the British government to support the move and take the country into ever-closer union with Europe all but split the Conservative party.

Nigel Farage then an unknown was one of many to leave the Conservatives at the time over their direction on Europe. A founding member of the UK Independence Party in 1993, Mr Farage has been a persistent character of this decade, having come to national attention after suffering a broken sternum, broken ribs, and punctured lung in an air-crash on the morning of the 2010 general election.

While all will remember the 2016 referendum, 2014 was the year Britains fortunes turned with respect to the European Union. In the European Union parliament elections of that year, UKIP became the first party other than Labour or the Conservatives to win a national election in over a century, setting alarm bells ringing among the establishment parties in Westminster.

Desperate to not have his leadership torn apart by the European issue as it has John Majors in 1992, then Prime Minister David Cameron promised an in-out referendum on Britains membership of the European Union as a means to appease Eurosceptics in the 2015 general election. This was an easy promise for Mr Cameron to make neither he nor the pollsters expected him to win the vote outright, and another coalition government would give him ample opportunity to renege on the pledge.

Yet he romped home with 24 more seats, so Mr Cameron gave Britain the referendum hed promised. Again an easy decision for him the Prime Minister, all his colleagues, the people they socialised with, other world leaders, and the pollsters all believed hed easily win the vote, and in doing so would put the issue of Europe to bed for another generation. To make the gamble a sure one, the government threw its full weight behind the remain side, wrote to every household in the country explaining why the European Union is a good thing, and indulged in what was then called project fear.

Well, we know how that went. Yet almost four years later the United Kingdom still hasnt left the European Union but seems all but certain to do so and new Prime Minister Boris Johnson is promising a decade of growth, prosperity and Brexit.

Happy new year!

Terrorism, Brexit, and the Migrant Crisis: Three Stories That Defined the Decade - Breitbart

Austria’s Kurz returns to power amid questions over whether ‘marriage of convenience’ with Greens can last – The Telegraph

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

He rejected coalition talks with the centre-Left Social Democrats (SP) after pledging to end the grand coalitions between Austrias two largest parties that were seen as an establishment carve-up.

The Social Democrats, who will now form the main opposition, were quick to dismiss the new coalition agreement. Its an VP program with Green camouflage, said Pamela Rendi-Wagner, the party leader.

It is striking that it predominantly bears the signature of the VP. The Greens have apparently only managed to secure positions in the area of climate protection, said Michael Ludwig, the influential mayor of Vienna.

It will be the Austrian Greens first term in government, and senior party figures defended the coalition agreement, insisting it was a price worth paying to secure their flagship climate policy.

We promised our voters a lot on climate protection, poverty reduction and transparency, and we stuck to that, Birgit Hebein, the partys regional leader in Vienna said.

Of course, there are some painful points, particularly on the topic of asylum, but we mustnt forget we only won 14 per cent of the vote, and we are taking on a great responsibility for the country. It was clear from the start there would have to be compromises.

Read the original post:

Austria's Kurz returns to power amid questions over whether 'marriage of convenience' with Greens can last - The Telegraph

Muslim population of England smashes three million mark for first time ever, figures reveal – The Sun

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

ENGLAND'S Muslim population has smashed the three million mark in 2019.

Some parts of London are now almost 50 per cent Islamic, according to analysis from the Office for National Statistics.

If current trends continue the areas could become majority Muslim within ten years.

Official ONS figures for 2018/19 that were released in December show that there are 3,194,791 Muslims living in England, with over a third aged under 16.

English Muslims make up the vast majority of the 3,363,210 currently living in England, Scotland and Wales. They make up 5.9 per cent of the 2018 English population (55.16 million).

2018 figures show that London was home to nearly 1.26 million Muslims, making up 14.2 per cent of the capital's population. 74 per cent of Londoners are listed as Christian or a-religious.

Following the migrant crisis that started in 2015, there were reports thatIslamic populations would triple by 2050as refugees headed west.

However the Islamic community in England is relatively low compared to other religions.

Christianity (all denominations) is still the most popular religion in England by a long shot, with 27.9 million people identifying with the church. 21.5 million of us don't identify with any religion at all.

The overall English population sampled by the 2019 ONS survey was 55,318,085. There were 63,783,693 Brits surveyed in all.

The Muslim Council of Britain has been approached for comment.

Original post:

Muslim population of England smashes three million mark for first time ever, figures reveal - The Sun

No network in times of crisis – The Hindu

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

Bangladesh shut telecom networks along the border on December 29 apparently to forestall any inflow of undocumented migrants in the aftermath of Indias new citizenship law. Just two days later, regulators reversed the ban, saying the restriction was temporary.

Telecom outage was expected to hit 10 million people living within 1 km of border areas. The worst was soon averted as the ban was quickly lifted, but it illustrates a growing trend of shutting telecom and Internet networks by governments in South Asia and beyond.

It is impossible to thwart any illegal border crossing by shutting down mobile networks, said Abu Saeed Khan, a senior policy fellow at LIRNEasia, a Colombo-based ICT policy think-tank. The movement of human beings across the border is unstoppable unless you erect a wall the way Israel did or whatever Mr. [Donald] Trump is contemplating, Mr. Khan said. If a group decides to cross the border, they will cross the border at any cost. There may be a debate on the motivation of such migration, but the fact remains that its happening and it will keep on happening.

Authorities may reduce or stop the flow in some hotspots, but the huge border with India is a key challenge. If you stop at one place, they will find out another, Mr. Khan said, referring to a fertile frontier of more than 4,000 km that the two countries share.

With the focus cast on the frontier, Major General Shafeenul Islam, Director General of Border Guard Bangladesh, provided some clarity on illegal border crossings. Bangladesh arrested about 1,000 people for illegal crossings in and out of India in 2019, with 445 of them returning home in two months: November and December, Mr. Islam said at a media briefing in Dhaka on January 2.

After the Upper House of the Indian Parliament passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill in December, it sparked fears of illegal crossings into Bangladesh. Mr. Islam, however, did not link the arrests to the fallout of Indias new law. He said those migrant workers, all identified as Bangladesh nationals, crossed into India in search of jobs. Jhenaidah and Satkhira emerged as the two major illicit migratory routes.

Risks of illicit crossings across the frontier deepened after all residents of the State of Assam, along the Bangladesh border, had to produce documentary proof that they or their ancestors had lived in India since 1971. About 2 million of Assams population of 33 million a mix of Hindus and Muslims failed the test. They now run the risk of becoming stateless.

As the protests over the new law spread, India shut down the Internet in Assam and some other areas. The Internet shutdown in Kashmir is now the longest-ever imposed in a democracy, according to Access Now, an international advocacy group that tracks internet suspensions.

Mr. Khan calls it counterproductive. In doing so, India is antagonising its own people. And telecom carriers are losing money, he said.

The shutdowns of mobile and internet networks have unintended consequences and take a toll on economic life in both urban and rural areas. In Bangladesh, for example, mobile phones are the fastest way for people to transfer money in outlying border areas, where conventional banking is almost non-existent.

That means the network suspension is akin to shutting down a large part of business activity in remote areas. Millions of Bangladeshis living alongside the frontier are largely engaged in cross-border trade of medicines, agricultural commodities, milk and livestock. More and more society migrates into digital payment systems, the Internet becomes more important simultaneously. Its like oxygen in life.

Bangladesh has a history of shutting down or slowing the Internet over security concerns. During a road safety campaign by students in 2018, regulators briefly blocked 3G and 4G mobile Internet services to quell protests, leaving users in the lurch.

I find no reason to shut down the Internet to thwart civil protests because people communicate despite the shutdown. These are not political decisions, but bureaucratic decisions. The bureaucracy has taken over the politicians space and their over-adventurism is the prime driver of this hegemony, Mr. Khan said.

The regulators latest decision to shut the frontier mobile networks and retract it shortly afterwards reflect a lack of coordination between government agencies and weakness of the regulator itself, according to Mr. Khan.

(Arun Devnath is a journalist based in Dhaka)

You have reached your limit for free articles this month.

Find mobile-friendly version of articles from the day's newspaper in one easy-to-read list.

Enjoy reading as many articles as you wish without any limitations.

A select list of articles that match your interests and tastes.

Move smoothly between articles as our pages load instantly.

A one-stop-shop for seeing the latest updates, and managing your preferences.

We brief you on the latest and most important developments, three times a day.

Not convinced? Know why you should pay for news.

*Our Digital Subscription plans do not currently include the e-paper ,crossword, iPhone, iPad mobile applications and print. Our plans enhance your reading experience.

View original post here:

No network in times of crisis - The Hindu

10 stories that changed Europe in the last decade – Euronews

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

The murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia (Malta, 2017)

Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist, was murdered in 2017 and two years on the scandal has seen three senior cabinet ministers stand down and the countrys prime minister, Joseph Muscat, promise to quit in January 2020.

Three men are currently awaiting trial for the 53-year-olds murder, but the authorities have not tracked down who hired them. Muscats chief of staff, Keith Schembri, resigned after he was arrested by police over the killing. He has denied any knowledge of or links with the murder.

Herman Grech, the editor of the Times of Malta, told Euronews the case had presented many lessons that Europe now needed to learn, from the importance of independent media - which has led the breakthrough, he said - to the importance of keeping an eye on the institutions of all countries, even the microscopic ones.

From a social perspective it reflected the way the masses turned a blind eye to cronyism and corruption as it fed off the altar of greed, he said.

Brexit has cost two prime ministers their jobs, led to two elections in as many years and dominated British politics since a small majority of Britons voted to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016.

But while pundits at the time saw Brexit as the beginning of the end of the EU with calls for a French Frexit, a Dutch Nexit, and so on the opposite has in fact proved true, Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University, London, told Euronews.

Brexit has actually made some Europeans, who'd maybe forgotten quite how important the EU was to them, realise its value, Bale says.

Poll after poll now suggest that fewer and fewer European Union citizens nowadays show any serious enthusiasm for the idea that their country should follow the UK out of the EU.

When 195 countries signed the Paris Agreement on December 12, 2015, they made a promise to try and reduce the risks and impact of climate change. To do so, they volunteered to curtail their carbon emissions and work towards preventing a global average temperature increase of more than 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. The consequence of breaking said promise: none.

The good news: climate policy EU-wide and within member states has actually changed, Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute Prof Dr Richard J.T. Klein told Euronews. On top of that, he predicts the European Green Deal will transform many economic sectors that create greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite the US withdrawal from the agreement, European countries are determined to stay committed. According to Klein, the deal will likely mark an important point in changing the narrative in Europe. Maybe we won't so much pinpoint the Paris Agreement per se, but we'll recognise the value of the policies and measures that the EU and its member states are and will be implementing in response to the agreement, he adds.

Even though both the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal are the right steps in the right direction, Klein also urges that societies will need to increase their efforts to prepare for the impacts of climate change, which is equally urgent as reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, the European Green Deal remains silent about this part of climate policy.

The #Metoo movement went global after sexual abuse allegations against Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein became public in October 2017.

As European Ombudsman Emily OReilly told Euronews: "The #MeToo movement was all about empowerment. It allowed women in Europe and elsewhere to speak up about their experiences of sexual harassment and know that the culture of silence and denial that previously existed was crumbling."

It didnt take long for the movement to become big in Europe. More than seven million women are estimated to have protested in womens marches worldwide since then. But the impact hasnt been the same everywhere.

Some countries, such as France, Spain and Italy, came up with their own version of the Metoo hashtag, such as #BalanceTonPorc in France and #Cuntalo in Spain.

In the UK, defence secretary Michael Fallon resigned amid allegations of inappropriate behaviour. Meanwhile, the effect in some Balkan and Eastern European countries, as well as in Germany, has been limited in comparison.

All in all, OReilly says the biggest change was public awareness. It also showed why it is so important to have women in positions of power, she added. For the first time we now have female presidents of both the European Commission and the European Central Bank this is a strong positive message for younger generations of women."

When Ukraine announced in February 2014 that little green men had started seizing facilities in Crimea, Vladimir Putin denied that the soldiers which were carrying Russian weapons and wearing Russian military garb were Russian. In April, he admitted that they were.

By then, a referendum had been held in occupied Crimea on March 16, with the dubious result of 97% voting to join Russia. The U.N. voted 100-11 to condemn the move, while the European Union applied sanctions. But five years on, Crimea remains in Russian hands.

Read more: EU to consider increasing sanctions on Russia over the conflict in Ukraine

The annexation may have been eclipsed by the war in eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists, which has raged since April 2014, but still poses a fundamental challenge to the European order, according to Steven Pifer, at Brookings.

Although Putin has held back from occupying the Donbas region, the annexation of Crimea has alarmed European former Soviet republics such as Lithuania and Estonia and reflects a greater polarisation in Europe, with the EU on one side and Putins Russia on the other.

While refugees and migrants have always attempted the sea crossing between Turkey and Greece and Libya and Italy in an attempt to reach Europe, during the first three months of 2015 the number of drownings in the Mediterranean rose to 1,687 from 60 a year earlier.

In April, an estimated 800 people were killed in a single shipwreck and the EU voted to expand its multinational sea rescue operation, Triton. Meanwhile, hundreds of boats crossed the Mediterranean, while refugees many of them fleeing from the increasingly brutal war in Syria walked towards northern Europe in their thousands.

Read more: How the English Channel became a new frontier of the migrant crisis

Since 2016, crossings have fallen sharply, but a byproduct of the refugee crisis has been a surge in support for far-right parties in Europe, with leaders from Hungarys Viktor Orban to the Alternative for Germany (AfD), to Italys Lega and Britains Brexit Party making opposition to migration a key electoral issue.

In 2019, the refusal to allow boats to dock and legal actions against NGOs carrying out rescues along with agreements with countries like Libya and Turkey to prevent migrants from leaving for Europe have had mixed results. Meanwhile, the deadly crossings continue.

In November 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych announced that Ukraine would not sign an association agreement with the European Union. Within a week, one million Ukrainians had taken to the streets, and in February after months of protests Yanukovych fled to Russia.

2014 saw the Russian annexation of Crime and the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine, and five years on Crimea remains in Russian hands and the conflict continues in the Donbas between Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces and militias.

Given that, many feel that the successes of the Maidan protests - named after the square in which they began in Kyiv - were few and far between. But they demonstrated to Europe that popular desire from Ukrainians to have a closer relationship with Europe - the protests in Maidan began under European Union flags - at a time when enlargement is a key issue for the EU.

Catalonias struggle for independence from Spain has exacerbated in the past decade. After a non-binding independence referendum in defiance of Spains constitutional court on 1 October 2017, nine of the twelve accused independence movement leaders received prison sentences for the crimes of sedition in October 2019. In the wake of the referendum, protests erupted all across Catalonia.

Kristian Herbolzheim, director of the International Catalan Institute for Peace (ICIP) told Euronews that Catalonias quest for independence poses a major challenge" to the EU on several fronts.

"At a political level, it is disturbing that one of the most important member states seems unable to address the conflict through political means. This creates a paradox, as the EU likes to profile itself as an institution that is happy to facilitate dialogue between conflicting parties internationally, but is reluctant to get involved in affairs that are considered internal to the member states.

On top of that, Spain is blocking Kosovos access to the EU on the grounds of not setting a precedent for regions such as Catalonia. This may also have implications if Scotland has a new referendum leading to independence.

All in all the conflict is calling to revisit the concepts of sovereignty and democracy within the EU in the 21st Century. Both those in favour and against Catalan independence are largely pro-EU. This should incentivise the EU to find a creative way of playing some sort of constructive role, Herbholzheim added.

After lengthy negotiations, Iran agreed to a deal for its nuclear programme with the US, UK, France, China, Russia and Germany in 2015. Iran agreed to limit its nuclear activities and regular inspections by international experts in return for the lifting of economic sanctions.

Not only did the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, provide Europe with a relatively high degree of certainty that Iran could not pursue a military option with its nuclear programme, but it also allowed European countries to pursue business interests once again with Iran which is of economic benefit to them, Xanthe Hall, co-director of the German affiliate of the Nobel Peace Prize winning organisation International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) told Euronews.

France considering mechanism in Iran nuclear deal to enact UN sanctions

Iran begins injecting uranium gas into Fordow centrifuges why is this important?

In 2017 US President Donald Trump announced the US would abandon the deal and re-impose sanctions. As a consequence, the remaining partners came up with a way to bypass the US dollar and introduced a financial system of trade with Iran (INSTEX).

The US decision to leave the deal is one of the more significant wedges in US-EU relations Narges Bajoghli, Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University told Euronews.

Within Iran, the deal has solidified the narrative among more conservative political forces that the US cannot be a trusted international partner. It has also demonstrated to Iran that the EU cannot exert actual power vis-a-vis the US, even to protect agreements it adheres to. Overall, the fall-out of the deal after the US withdrawal will most likely be looked back upon as a time that led to increased tensions in the Middle East to the detriment of manyat the request of a few Bajoghli added.

European countries have been a primary target for terrorist attacks in the last decade. With the defeat of Al Qaeda and so-called Islamic State, there have been more attacks carried out by solo actors who affiliate themselves with certain radical groups who are Islamist, white-supremacist or separatist.

"The main change has been the rise of the inspired attack; an attack that is not the sophisticated result of extensive planning and central coordination, but rather one executed by an individual who has had little contact with the organisation that he or she claims to support, using everyday tools such as a knife or a truck," Richard Barrett of the Global Strategy Network told Euronews.

"The perception of marginalisation and the speed of radicalisation to violence are both by-products of the exponential rise in the use of social media and the ability of terrorist groups to wrap individual grievance into a wider conspiracy theory," he added.

Some of the defining events that come to mind are the 2011 attack in Norway, the Paris attacks in November 2015, the 2016 truck attacks in Nice and a Berlin Christmas market. The UK witnessed an unusual number of attacks, such as the murder of UK parliamentarian Jo Cox (2016), the London Bridge attack and Manchester Arena bombing of 2017.

Even though terrorism on a global scale is decreasing, far-right terror is on the rise in the West. According to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2019, far-right terrorism has increased by 320% in the last five years. The report ranks the UK as the 28th most affected country in the world - the worst record for a western European nation.

Read more:Far-right terrorism on the rise in the West, bucking global terror trends

Nora Demleitner professor of law at the Washington and Lee School of Law Media told Euronews that editorial choices by media outlets have a substantial effect on the public's perception.

"The focus on Jihadist attacks remains high," she said.

"They tend to cover them substantially more than terror attacks inspired by other ideologies. That is particularly true for right-wing attacks. So the public likely overestimates the likelihood of Jihadist terror. Also, to note here the fear of widespread terror attacks tied to the demise of ISIS and the concern about returnees has not come true. Still, domestic fears have led the European countries failing to acknowledge their own citizens who are being held in Middle Eastern countries. The long-term fallout of that response remains to be seen. Most extreme Britain increasingly resorts to the revocation of citizenship."

Originally posted here:

10 stories that changed Europe in the last decade - Euronews

From Nazi camps to the Lake District: the story of the Windermere children – The Guardian

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

On the morning of 14 August 1945 towards the end of the second world war, 16-year-old Arek Hersh and 300 other Jewish children boarded a squadron of 10 converted Stirling bombers and took off from Prague. They were organised in groups of 30 to each aeroplane, with 15 sitting on each side on the floor. Hersh remembers it vividly: They cut us some bread, he says. We thought it was cake. They gave us each a piece and it was great. About eight hours later, they landed at RAF Crosby-on-Eden, near Carlisle.

The children were the first intake of a pioneering rehabilitation scheme, in which boys and girls from labour and concentration camps in eastern Europe were transported to the Lake District to find new families and start afresh. Their journey has been dramatised by the screenwriter Simon Block and the result is a timely and moving BBC film The Windermere Children, starring Thomas Kretschmann and Romola Garai, to be shown this month, 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

At 91, Hersh is spry with a mischievous sense of humour. For almost half a century, he spoke to no one about his Holocaust experience. Not to his three daughters, who are old enough now not only to have kids of their own but also grandchildren. Nor to Jean, his second wife, whom he married in the early 1970s. Eventually, around 1995, Hersh decided to write it all down. The words came excruciatingly slowly. Two lines a day, he recalls, when we meet at his comfortable home just north of Leeds. But I wrote it, and then after that I could speak, I could talk about it.

Before the war, Hersh Herszlikowicz back then lived with his parents, brother and three sisters in Sieradz, a garrison town in west Poland. His father was a bootmaker, much in demand for making officers footwear. When the Nazis invaded, they came first for Hershs father, but he escaped; they came back for his brother, but he also slipped away. That left 11-year-old Arek, who was packed off to a labour camp near Poznan to lay lines and sleepers for the Poznan-Warsaw railway, which would speed up the German attack on the Soviet Union. One of his responsibilities was to clean the room of the camp commandant, who every day would leave Hersh a hunk of bread on his desk. It wasnt much, but Hersh believes it saved his life. We started with 2,500 men, he says. Within 18 months, there were only 11 of us left alive. And I was one of them. Very, very lucky.

Luck is a word that comes up again and again in Hershs account. When he was sent to Auschwitz in 1944, he told the SS officer that he was 17 and a locksmith. He wasnt either of those things; he just wanted to suggest that he might be useful to the Nazis. So thats what I said, and they told me to go to the right side, says Hersh. And 180 children all went to the wrong side. And they were murdered.

The most gruelling experience for Hersh personally, however, came in the early months of 1945, when he was evacuated first on foot, in the bitter cold, to the Buchenwald camp in Germany and finally to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia on what he calls the train of damnation. A whole month on open wagons without food, says Hersh, shaking his head. We ate grass. I ate the leather on my left shoe to keep going. I didnt swallow but I chewed it.

Your first instinct is to try to think your way into their heads. But you realise thats impossible

Hersh was in Theresienstadt, expecting any moment to be killed, when the camp was liberated by the Russian army on 8 May, 1945. He was moved on to Prague and it was here he was selected for the Committee for the Care of Children from Concentration Camps, which was set up by the British philanthropist Leonard Montefiore, a leading figure in the Anglo-Jewish Association. Montefiore persuaded the British government to accept 1,000 displaced children aged eight to 16; the Home Office agreed on condition that the funds were found by the Jewish community. In the end 650 boys and 80 girls came over.

What kind of physical and mental shape must these children have been in? How do you begin to repair the damage done to individuals, who in many cases were the only surviving members of large families? How do you try to imagine what they might be thinking? These were the questions that faced the therapists and educators at Windermere who were to help them in August 1945. It was also a quandary for the team behind the new drama.

Your first instinct is to try to think your way into their heads, says Simon Block. But you realise thats impossible. I cant imagine what Arek, who was in four different concentration and labour camps including Auschwitz, went through. And not just for a day, but for years. You cant recreate that trauma; all you can do is reflect how their behaviour may have manifested some of that while they were at Windermere.

Hersh turns up the electric fire a notch and Jean walks in with a tray of tea, biscuits and cake, and instructs me with brisk hospitality to tuck in, because her husband will probably forget. On the walls are photographs of Hersh with the Queen, Prince Charles and Liza Minnelli. Oh yes, she dedicated a song to me one time, he says.

After landing at Crosby-on-Eden, Hersh and the other children were driven to the Calgarth estate in the village of Troutbeck Bridge. A mile from Windermere, it was a wartime housing scheme that had been used for workers from the Short Sunderland aeroplane factory, which had relocated there to evade the bombing. Dormitory accommodation was provided as well as single rooms for older boys, like Hersh. Each one had a bed, a chest of drawers, he says. There was everything you needed.

The Windermere programme is not as well known as the Kindertransport initiative, which moved nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Nazi-occupied territories to Britain between 1938 and 1939. At that time, some British politicians, including former prime minister Lord Baldwin, argued that it was a humanitarian duty. I have to ask you to come to the aid of the victims, not of any catastrophe in the natural world, not of an earthquake, he said, but of an explosion of mans inhumanity to man.

Block sees clear parallels with todays migrant crisis. Windermere is a story of refugees and child refugees, he says, and I thought it was very pertinent considering what was going on at the time [in Calais] when we started working on it.

In 1945, the immediate priorities for the children were to get clothing and find out about their families. The Red Cross supplied clothes, but they were odd shapes and sizes, so many children walked around in their underwear for a few days until donations of garments from local families started arriving.

We started to live as normally as we could, remembers Hersh. Some kids brought us bicycles and they said, Go on, have a ride! We didnt understand what they were saying, but they gave us a bicycle. So we went on the main road, and we were cycling on the right-hand side, so they tooted the horn like mad, shouting from the cars. We didnt know what they were shouting at us. We couldnt speak one word of English! But we caught on quite quickly, and we went to the cinemas, sixpence per seat, and it was very nice and we made our own life and things were OK.

News of their families took time to trickle through. For some there was hope, even something close to a miracle. There is a powerful moment in The Windermere Children when one of the children is reunited with a long-lost brother, who he has been told has probably died. That really happened. Oh, it would be incredibly manipulative to have made that up, says Block. No, if you have that, you wouldnt need to make anything up.

For most though, including Hersh, there was only despair. He found out his mother had been gassed and thrown into a mass grave at the Chelmno extermination camp. Of his immediate family, only his older sister Mania had survived, having escaped to the Soviet Union. There is a scene in the drama where Hersh all the children, are played by Polish actors hears about the fate of his family and soon after breaks up with his girlfriend. I still had so much grief, he recalls. I had lost my whole family and I felt I couldnt worry about my girlfriend as well.

At the Calgarth estate, the children received no counselling. Instead, they were encouraged to swim in the lake, play football, and given basic English lessons. The thing about therapy obviously is that its only any use if somebody wants to engage with it, says Block. Almost the main point was to bring them together in one place where they could be with other people whod been through what theyd been through, talk about it among themselves if they wanted to.

That was certainly Hershs experience. There were three or four boys I had been with in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he says. We were always together. So I could talk to them, because they had a similar story to mine, but not to anybody else.

We just had to suffer, he goes on. Terrible. I had about 30 years of nightmares. Middle of the night, I used to get a nightmare and so on. It was only after he had completed his book, A Detail of History, in 1998, he says, that he finally began to heal. Its left me now. After I wrote the book actually, it left me then.

The Calgarth estate programme was designed to be a temporary scheme, running for four months, after which, the younger children would be placed in the care of foster families, and the older ones would live in hostels and prepare for work. Hersh moved first to Liverpool with his friends and then Manchester. He trained as an electrician, but eventually, living in Leeds after marrying Jean, he bought and let property, mainly to students. Somewhere along the line, in the 1950s, he shortened his name from Herszlikowicz, because he was fed up with having to spell it out.

Block, who also wrote the 2015 BBC drama The Eichmann Show about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, interviewed a dozen Windermere survivors and found that most of them were very eager to get on with life. He continues, They couldnt bury what happened to them completely because it would come back in their sleep, in their subconscious, but they wanted families and all the rest of that. It was when they retired and they had more time to reflect that it all came barrelling back to them.

Hersh is now involved in education, at schools and universities, and with the charity March of the Living, which each year organises a walk between the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. In 2009, he was awarded an MBE. When I first went back to Auschwitz, it was awful for me, he says. I couldnt get through the gate. But after three attempts I got through and since then Ive been going there with children and young people to show them the place.

These visits are clearly still not easy why does he put himself through it? Because I dont want people to think that it just happened many moons ago, and people forgot about it, he says. I talk to everybody, so young people know that what actually happened to me can happen to anybody. Thats the main reason I do it.

Block found that this idea of giving something back is a recurring theme. The Windermere children are the most patriotic people Ive ever come across, he says. Theyre so grateful for the chance they got to start their lives again in the UK, and they want to express that in many ways, by being successful here and paying taxes and raising their families here.

Hopefully viewers will think, Well, its not impossible to bring people here and help them rather than be scared of those who might be fleeing from terrible experiences. We can bring them in, help them and then thats repaid many times over.

The Windermere Children will be broadcast on BBC Two later this month.

On 27 January, Holocaust Memorial Day 2020 will mark 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Information on different ways to get involved in this landmark anniversary can be found here

Read the original here:

From Nazi camps to the Lake District: the story of the Windermere children - The Guardian

In a lifetime on the border, Agent Chancy Arnold has seen it transform – Los Angeles Times

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Danzig

Fresh out of the academy yet still very much an agent-in-training, Chancy Arnold was finally being given a little range.

He and his partner were told to drive on the border road east, familiarize themselves with the rolling hills and unmarked trails that would become their new office.

As they approached the base of Otay Mountain in San Diego County, they came upon a man lying face down in the dirt. About 50 yards to the south, a flimsy barbed wire fence denoted the U.S.-Mexico border.

Strange, Arnold thought, does he really think hes hiding from us?

The agents yelled at the man: Get up, we can see you!

He remained still.

Closer inspection revealed the grisly truth: Someone had driven the migrant through the border, ordered him to the ground and put a bullet in the back of his head.

Even as a rookie, Arnold thought he had a pretty good idea of what it would be like to be a Border Patrol agent. His father had worn the same olive green uniform for as long as he could remember. But the discovery that day was a shock and a glimpse of the ruthless landscape he was now part of.

That was 1985, and Arnold is now nearing 35 years with the agency, making him the longest-serving Border Patrol agent in the nation.

The border has changed considerably in that time.

Arnold has watched the terrain transform into one of fences and roads, surveillance cameras and sensors. Hes seen migration patterns turn from single Mexican men to unaccompanied children and asylum-seeking families.

Hes had to acknowledge the humanity and desperation of the people he encounters while enforcing the laws and policies hes sworn to uphold.

Most agents retire after 20 to 25 years. But Arnold always planned to work until the Border Patrol made him leave. That will be in July, when he turns 57.

Since Day 1, Arnold said, I was going to work until the end.

Arnold was just shy of 3 years old when his father left his job as a roughneck on a Montana oil rig and joined the Border Patrol in 1965. The Arnolds left the northern plains for the dusty borderlands of El Centro.

The year his father joined was a turning point on the southwestern border. The U.S. bracero program, which had sanctioned agricultural labor by Mexican migrants, had just been shut down. And the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 for the first time restricted legal immigration from the Western Hemisphere, including Mexico, while opening it up to Asia and Africa. Preference was given to those with U.S. citizen family members or desirable skills and professions.

But demand for Mexican labor didnt end, and soon migration that once might have been legal was now illegal, creating a large new population of unauthorized immigrants.

The El Centro sector apprehended some 5,300 migrants in 1965, a figure that more than doubled over the next five years. In neighboring San Diego, apprehensions rose to 50,600 over the same period.

It wasnt until Arnold was around 21 that he could imagine carving his own path as an agent.

What the Border Patrol represented securing our borders, securing our nation appealed to me at the time, he recalled. It also provided for a long-term career, no college degree needed, and the chance to work outdoors.

Quite honestly, he said, it was what I knew.

On a recent Friday, Arnold made the familiar trek to Arnies Point, a vista overlooking what used to be one of the most heavily trafficked illegal border crossings.

It looks nothing like it did when he was a mop-top rookie.

But gazing down, Arnold with a military-style crew cut now turned silver was looking decades into the past.

He could see thousands of migrants gathering in a soccer field that has since been filled in by dirt. He could see the vendors in the festival-like atmosphere selling last-minute provisions before the nightly surge north. And he could see agents running through the scrub brush in pursuit.

Catch who you can, process them at the station, come back for more. Repeat. That was the pace back in those days.

In 1985, San Diego accounted for more than 427,000 of the southwest borders 1.2 million apprehensions, the most of any sector.

Just like when his father joined the agency, the southwestern border was at another turning point. In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act sought to stem the rising illegal flow by authorizing a 50% increase in Border Patrol staffing and toughening criminal laws against employers. At the same time, it provided a pathway for amnesty for some longtime migrant residents, giving them a chance at legal status.

But illegal immigration continued to grow.

And the increased manpower was slow to materialize. It wasnt until 1994 that the roughly 3,000 agents nationwide in the mid-1980s grew to 4,200, according to Syracuse Universitys Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which gathers federal data.

About 140 of those agents were assigned to Brown Field station when Arnold began. Their coverage area stretched from just east of the San Ysidro Port of Entry to Otay Mountain.

It was from here that Arnold departed each evening, armed with a six-shooter revolver, six to 12 spare bullets, handcuffs and a radio. Agents patrolled in American-made SUVs.

The border fence then was nothing more than barbed wire or cable strung between poles. It didnt stop foot traffic from coming north. Rather, it was meant to stop vehicle loads of drugs or people. It worked sometimes.

Working the swing shift, thered be eight or nine vehicle chases going on at the same time, Arnold recalled. Itd be like a dog fight, trying to figure out whos got this chase and whats going on with that one.

Just north of Arnies Point, finger canyons disappear around the bend. Thats where, in the dense brush, Arnold once hunted for bandits who were hunting for migrants.

The canyons were notoriously violent, a place where robbers could easily hide and prey on those who crossed north. Rapes, assaults and murder were common.

Arnold was just three years out of the academy when he was picked for the elite bandit detail. The stakes were higher on this assignment, and gunfights were practically inevitable.

In fact, Arnies Point was named for one. Its where Agent Arnie Forsyth was once hit in the buttocks during a shoot-out with bandits.

Arnold got into his first and only gunfight in a canyon farther west.

The detail had intelligence of a two-man ambush operation, where one bandit would hide behind a stand of trees at a T-intersection of two trails while the other would distract passing migrants.

Sure enough, Arnolds group approached and took down the distractor. Then the bandits partner came around from behind with a loaded .45-caliber pistol. The agents fired. The bandit was hit; he survived.

Arnolds rotation on the bandit detail was the second to last before the unit was disbanded. But he credits the experience for making him a better cop.

I think it helped me grow up.

More substantial fencing starting going up around 1990 to stem the increasing flow of migrants. But the corrugated landing-mat material, installed on its side, acted more like a ladder than a fence.

It was also easily breached with tools.

At the same time, a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment was sweeping the state. Then-Gov. Pete Wilson helped push through Proposition 187, a voter-approved initiative that slashed state services such as healthcare and public education to unauthorized immigrants. The law was later overturned by a federal judge.

A new strategy was launched in 1994 called Operation Gatekeeper that flooded the San Diego border with agents in three tiers a highly visible show of force that would dissuade migrants from crossing in the first place and catch those who did farther inland.

Apprehensions soared in the first year to more than half A million, then they began to drop off sharply. From fiscal 1995 to 2005, overall apprehensions in the sector declined by 76%.

While some may have been disinclined to make the journey north, however, most just shifted routes east to the less fortified deserts, into the territory Arnolds father had once patrolled.

In the five years after Gatekeeper was launched, apprehensions in El Centros sector rose from 37,317 to 238,126.

The shift didnt come as a surprise but was rather a tactical decision by leaders: Push illegal crossings away from large cities and into wilderness areas for easier apprehensions. But the human cost was high, as the harsher environment claimed thousands of lives over the years.

Following in his fathers footsteps, Arnold eventually transitioned into management.

Hes covered just about every job in the San Diego sector: supervisor, training officer, watch commander. He spent 13 years in the prosecutions unit, readying cases for criminal and administrative court. By then, he had gone back to school, earning a criminal justice degree.

Arnold went to Washington in 2009 for nine months to coordinate care for unaccompanied minors, who in the years preceding had been fleeing to the United States in record numbers. The waves had sent authorities scrambling to find a way to place the children, mostly teens, in appropriate housing long term while caring for their short-term needs at Border Patrol stations.

The experience would help prepare him for his current role.

As assistant chief over prosecutions, asset forfeiture and detentions in the San Diego sector, Arnold has most recently been in charge of mitigating what he calls a humanitarian crisis that started about a year ago with the surge of Central American caravans arriving at the border to seek asylum. Most of them are families.

Although some of the migrants follow protocol and present themselves at ports of entry, many see the long wait of metered lines and cross illegally. Then they sit and wait to be arrested, so they can claim asylum.

Many families ended up staying several days at Border Patrol stations, long past the 72-hour limit, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement reluctant to release them into the community determined where to house them next in accordance with a court agreement that set out the terms of detention for children.

All our Border Patrol stations are set up, built and designed not for families, not for children, but for single adult males, Arnold said. We were holding people in custody longer than we ever intended to hold people in. People in custody longer require more resources.

The change in population shifted agents away from patrolling the line and into caretaker roles.

The latest scrutiny comes as a group of doctors urges Customs and Border Protection, the umbrella agency of the Border Patrol, to hold free flu shot clinics in detention centers for migrant children. Three children have died in detention from the flu in the past year, none in San Diego.

A few weeks ago, doctors demonstrated outside the Border Patrols sector headquarters in Chula Vista, where Arnold is based; the day ended with six protesters arrested.

CBP officials have called vaccine programs in short-term detention not feasible.

The current spotlight on the border is perhaps the most intense its ever been and has created political and philosophical rifts across the country. In many ways, it illustrates the deeper divisions facing the nation.

Arnold tries not to let the discord get to him.

I know theres always throughout history going to be those individuals who dont agree with who we are or what we do, he said. One thing Ive tried to make sure were focused on is that we conduct ourselves with integrity and as professionals.

The vast majority of agents are at the mercy of laws, policies and a vast bureaucracy operating high above them.

We dont get the luxury to say no to laws weve been asked to enforce, he said. Were going to enforce those laws.

But not at the expense of losing their humanity.

I think were portrayed as not caring about people, Arnold said. We do. Your heart goes out to these people. We are humans, we do care about the individuals we encounter.

The Border Patrol is being handed over to a new generation, as agents who came on board during the hiring frenzy of Operation Gatekeeper begin to consider retirement.

But Arnold wont be leaving without first getting a seventh star on the sleeve of his uniform. He gets one for every five years of service.

Ive never met someone with seven stars in my career, he said.

Not even his dad, who retired with four.

Davis writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune

Originally posted here:

In a lifetime on the border, Agent Chancy Arnold has seen it transform - Los Angeles Times

Select Page ::