Evergreene Digest A Journal of Progress for the Rest of Us

By Carolyn Goossen

The best and the worst of the American mother was front and center at the Oscars on Sunday, in all of her Hollywood glory.

The “perfect mother” award (aka Best Actress Oscar) went to Sandra Bullock, for her role as a fierce and compassionate Suburban Republic mother in “The Blind Side.” Best depiction of the “demon mother” (aka best supporting actress) went to Mo’Nique, for her depiction of a depraved and abusive mother in “Precious.”

As a mother of a five-year old, with a second on the way, I’ve had mamahood on the brain, which includes a running list of mother-related stuff—planning out maternity leave and nursing schedules, dealing with working-mother guilt, kindergarten politics, and the ever present fear one day being parent to a teenage girl. It’s within this context that I watched the two opposite spectrums of motherhood depicted in The Blind Side and Precious.

In the Blind Side, based on the true life story of Michael Oher, a homeless and abandoned African American teenager in Memphis Tennessee who is taken in by a wealthy white family who help him reach his full potential as a brilliant offensive tackle, who shines in college football and goes on to the NFL. Bullock’s wealth, career and happy domestic life, complete with an adoring husband and two outstanding children, seem to allow her the space to show generosity and kindness to an abandoned Black boy who she finds wandering the streets one rainy night. She has it all, including a hot MILF bod, and she is therefore in a comfortable place to share it all with someone who has nothing.

Precious is about a disfunctional mother in Harlem, New York, who is the complete opposite set of circumstances. Mo’Nique has nothing that Bullock enjoys, and as a result, tries her best to make her daughter feel as if she is nothing. She is a single, poor, overweight mother, who sits in front of the television all day, on welfare, with a history of crack addiction, and the great misfortune to have fallen for a man who begins to molest her daughter from a young age. Mo’Nique’s circumstances, the film suggests, leads her to turn into the monster we see depicted on screen, as she mercilessly torments her teenage daughter Precious, through steady psychological, physical and sexual abuse.

The implciatin is that with material wealth and personal happiness come a stronger ability to be morally upright—to do the right thing. And that morality is lost, when poverty and sadness take over. (AO Scott, film critic with the New York Times in particular does a brilliant comparison of the two films, and the different ways in which they deal with race and poverty.)

In light of the Oscar wins, it’s fascinating to me that actresses playing these dyametrically opposite mothers were both awarded for their performances as the shinning light versus the glowering darkness of motherhood (aka womanhood). Neither is quite human- one too perfect, the other too terrifying, and I suppose that is why mothers like myself can watch them and their films as pure spectacle, and after shedding some tears of rage, sadness and happiness, feel okay about our own sincere efforts to be neither heroine, or villan, but just a decent parent.

Immigrant activist Felipe Matos, 23, knew that suspicion and resentment directed at Latinos was a problem in the Deep South.

So he knew that there would be risks when he embarked on the Trail of Dreams, a 1,500-mile walk to raise awareness about the impacts of the broken immigration system on families and young people.

“Unfortunately, the media has called us illegals,” said Matos last month, shortly before crossing the state line from Florida into Georgia.

“There’s racism all over the southeast, even though it is one of the most important emergent immigrant communities,” he added. “We want to talk to people face-to-face for them to see that we’re human.”

And that’s what Matos and his fellow activists have done—look people in the face. In Georgia, they confronted a KKK rally and the sheriff of an Atlanta suburb who had recently signed an agreement with the federal government to detain undocumented immigrants.

The walkers have not avoided confrontation despite the fact that three of the five, including Matos, are undocumented immigrants and risk detention and deportation via their public exposure.

Matos and the others began the walk in Miami. They are walking through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia on their way to Washington, D.C.

In part, the protest walk is about promoting federal legislation known as the Dream Act, which would give undocumented immigrants brought into this country by their parents the opportunity to become citizens after completing college.

At the state level, over a half-dozen states have passed laws also sometimes referred to as “Dream Acts” that allow undocumented immigrants access to in-state tuition.

Matos, for example, is an accomplished student at Miami Dade College, but is blocked from financial aid and other forms of support due to his lack of papers. He was brought to the United States by his Brazilian parents.

In Nahunta, in southern Georgia, the walkers participated in a counter-rally called in response to a KKK demonstration.

And in Gwinnett County, just outside the Atlanta city limits, they met with representatives of Sheriff Butch Conway. Late in 2009, the sheriff entered into an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement through which 18 deputies were trained to identify “illegal criminal aliens,” according to the Sheriff’s Department.

Latino and immigrant advocacy organizations have criticized the program, known as 287g for the section of immigration law that created it, for too often leading to racial profiling and casting a pall of suspicion on law-abiding communities. Scores of municipalities and counties nationwide run similar programs to Gwinnett’s.

The walkers are now heading into the Carolinas. Yesterday Georgia’s dominant newspaper the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a long story about the students’ walk for immigration reform.

All photos of the Georgia portion of the walk courtesy of Trail2010.

Note: This post was updated Wednesday, 1 AM ET, to correct language about the Dream Act in the eighth paragraph. The federal Dream Act does not address in-state tuition

Prominent immigrant advocates launched their most sharply worded public critique yet of the Obama administration’s immigration policy.

Advocates who spoke at today’s press conference in Washington, D.C. angrily pointed to statistics that showed a significant acceleration in immigration enforcement over President Bush’s last year, with over 387,000 immigrants deported since Obama’s inauguration.

As a result, livelihoods were lost, local economies affected, and families split apart, the advocates said.

“These are the same enforcement practices that we marched against during the Bush administration,” said Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

On any given day, Salas added, over 32,000 immigrants are under detention in jails and prisons around the country awaiting deportation.

The advocates said they felt betrayed by an Obama administration that promised to take their concerns into account and then became more aggressive than its predecessor in cracking down on immigrants.

Brent Wilkes, executive national director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, a Latino civil rights group, recalled candidate Barack Obama’s promise at a LULAC event to reform the country’s immigration laws in his first year in office.

Wilkes said many LULAC members believed this promise, which hasn’t yet been fulfilled.

“But one thing they never believed in their wildest dreams is that President Obama would have a record like this, where he surpassed the Bush administration in deportations,” Wilkes said. “It is unconscionable to have over 387,000 deported in the first year of an Obama presidency, and our community is angry.”

A video of the event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. is available for streaming at C-Span 2. The advocates called on President Obama and Congress to halt deportations until the system gets an overhaul.

The press conference came on the same day President Obama was scheduled to meet with Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in an effort to nudge immigration legislation forward.

One of the presenters today was a schoolgirl named Beatriz whose family was targeted by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement inquiry. She tearfully described how federal agents trailed her in order to investigate her parents.

Wilkes said roughly 5.5 million U.S. citizen children nationwide have at least one parent who is an unauthorized immigrant and that deportations inevitably lead to broken households.

“This administration seems proud to out-enforce the Bush administration,” added Pramila Jayapal, executive director of the Seattle-based OneAmerica group.

The advocates also contended that the immigration audits or “paper raids” that have replaced workplace raids under Obama are just as damaging to immigrant communities and the businesses that depend on them.

The advocates, part of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement coalition, plan to join other advocacy coalitions as well as labor and faith groups in a pro-immigration march on Washington, D.C. March 21.

by Ahmed Tharwat

I visited Egypt last month and spent a week covering a story with PBS News Hour crew. On my last day in Egypt, my family, who complained that I hadn’t spent much time with them, always working and running around, put together a farewell party for me. At my sister’s house, more than 25 of them started trickling in, family by family, kid by kid. We talked, laughed and cried; there was plenty of food and plenty of emotions.

The farewell celebration lasted until 2 a.m. Then I had to leave since my flight was at 4 a.m. No one was coming to the airport with me, I declared to the group. I had arranged for an airport service shuttle to pick me up. The drive to the Cairo International airport was surreal. The Cairo streets were too quiet, enveloped by the fresh cold morning air, a rarity that you should embrace while visiting Egypt. The procedure at the Cairo International Airport is very relaxed with security seeming to share your sadness at leaving.

Egyptian security are the best in the business. As you are going by the “metal detectives,” it seems they very relaxed, more clever and effective than the Americans. They don’t rely on technology that much, and may ignore the beeping red lights but they look in your eyes and study you. “Just go, don’t worry” the guard said, unlike in the States with the homeland security paranoia, where I have been picked out ‘randomly’ at the airport each time I’ve flown since 2001. I even started losing my faith in the theory of probability.

In Egypt, there’s no racial profiling, but there is context profiling, with this simple human-based security system. Still Egypt seems to have a much better national security record than the Americans; the U.S. spends billions of dollars every year on so-called home land security, however Mubarak will arrest more so-called “terrorist suspects in one day than American security catches in a year,” said Salah Hammad, an Egyptian sculptor who is also a friend. The flight left on time.

Now, fast forward 18 hours later when I landed at the St. Paul/Minneapolis airport. As I was getting out of the airplane’s tunnel, I heard ‘Step over here please,”—the soft voice of the young security guard for the U.S. Customs was directed only at me out of all the passengers. Now I realized I’m back in America. Amsterdam also does a thorough security—but one that everyone goes through.

After a brief line of questioning, he marked a code on my custom claim form. After getting my luggage, every time a security person looked at my claim form, he singled me out. Finally, I was instructed to follow the red line. That doesn’t sound good, I thought. What are they afraid of—the plane has already landed and I can’t possibly cause any harm to anybody. “Did you bring any ‘Lebb’ (Arabic for seeds),” asked the customs official, proud of his Arabic proficiency. No, I usually get them from the Holy Land store in Northeast Minneapolis. They took my luggage, opened and searched every inch of it. “You took lots of videos,” commented the overly-friendly female security, and started her interrogation, “What do you do, Sir, and where did you go and why,” the young security who first greeted me at the airplane, joined the search. He found my interviewing notebook, the one I had through the ordeal of the Sinai flood.

It was dirty and yellowed with traces of sand all over, but the security was overly-alarmed by the Arabic writing. He kept staring at my notebook as if he found the Al Qaeda manual. “What is this,” he casually asked. It is not food, I fired back. No, no I didn’t fire, just responded. To ward off any more questions, I dug through my stuff to find the parts to the “baladi shisha” which was a dried coconut shill, a piece of bamboo and a small ashtray. I quickly assembled it for the guard who continued to stare at my notebook. I explained the use and function of the shisha, but he was unimpressed, still intrigued by my Arabic writing in my notebook. They kept me standing for more than 40 minutes, while they took my case apart, all my stuff, my underwear, tapes, personal stuff lying all over the search table.

Finally, the disappointed security guard asked me to pack up my stuff again. “I don’t want to break anything for you,” he explained. Thank you, Sir; it is kind of too late. You have already broken my trust in the whole homeland “in” security business.

My wife was waiting patiently outside the security area, happy to see me walking alone even if I was the last one out. “Welcome home,” she said and we quickly left the airport. As we walked into the parking lot, my face was by the frigid Minnesota weather. Snow was covering everything; wherever you looked it was white. I felt like I was in a gigantic hospital room. I realized that I had left Egypt too soon.

Ahmed Tharwat is host of the Arab-American show “Belahdan,” which airs Saturdays at 10:30 p.m. on Twin Cities Public Television (Ch 202).

The 2009 fiscal year was one of the worst in history for the U.S. economy. But it was great for the nation’s top homeland security contractors.

That is one of the conclusions drawn by trade publication Government Security News from its list of the top Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contractors.

In fact, the contracts going to the top five companies on the list grew considerably in the year, according to the magazine:
“Despite the economic downturn that swept the country—and much of the world—in 2009, those Top 5 companies enjoyed increased total revenues from DHS in procurement, R&D and services contracts that averaged approximately 38 percent.
Thirty-eight percent growth in one year on government contracts worth hundreds of millions. Unisys, the fifth ranked company, pulled in $337 million in contracts during the fiscal year, in part for technology to capture and analyze traveler information at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services land border crossings. The top contractor Integrated Coast Guard Systems won $675 million, in part for modernizing U.S. Coast Guard ships and aircraft.

The 2009 fiscal year, on which the list is based, ran from Oct. 1, 2008 to Sept. 30, 2009.

Of course DHS contracting should continue at robust levels in a bad economy. The threats faced by the United States from terrorism, organized crime, and natural disasters (all in the DHS portfolio) don’t evaporate in a downturn. And they’re all real dangers the private sector should help the government prepare for and respond to.

But it’s at least noteworthy just how “counter-cyclical,” or running contrary to a shrinking economy, this pocket of the U.S. economy became.

The magazine did not say how much, on average, the revenue from DHS contracts grew during the period studied for the other 95 firms on the annual ranking of the largest 100 DHS contractors, compiled with information from the Federal Procurement Data System.

The list’s largest contractors remained fixed in their top spots over the previous year. The only newcomer to the first 10 rankings, the magazine said, was Booz Allen Hamilton, a company known for its national security and defense work and since mid-2008 majority-owned by private-equity giant The Carlyle Group.

Another notable entrant in the top 10 might have to be consulting firm Accenture, recently in the news for withdrawing its sponsorship of Tiger Woods. Accenture is a consulting firm which in 2001 headquartered itself in Bermuda and then in 2009 transferred its corporate base to Ireland.

Accenture, ranked sixth according to Government Security News, has a big job:
”[the company] serves as the prime contractor on a complex 10-year, $10 billion ‘virtual border’ project being deployed at more than 400 U.S. air, land and sea ports of entry. The contract calls for a biometrics systems design to verify the identity of incoming visitors and to confirm compliance with visa and immigration policies.

If the overall DHS budget is any indication, the money flowing to contractors won’t slow down any time soon. According to the Homeland Security Watch blog, despite rumors in Washington, D.C. that the DHS budget would be shrunk slightly, the department got a 2 percent bump from President Obama’s budget for Fiscal Year 2011.

The January edition of Government Security News containing a short description of top DHS contractors’ work can be accessed here. The complete list of the 100 top DHS contractors is available on the magazine’s website.

NY Times article reported that in the Philippines, you could get killed for singing Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ in a karaoke bar.

Our unemployment rate is not 9.7 percent, as the overall rate is. It is not the 16.7 percent that is officially reported. According to my own calculations, the black unemployment rate is at least 28.7 percent. Would such a rate be acceptable if “all” Americans were experiencing it?

Amidst lofty rhetoric and ambitious logistics, immigration reform activists are planning a mass demonstration next month at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The major forces behind the “March for America” are labor groups, immigrant advocacy organizations, and the Catholic Church.

The march will be a test of immigrant advocates’ organizing capacity and their increasing use of technology to stoke a popular groundswell on immigration.

In a recent Spanish-language op-ed penned for America’s Voice the organization’s Hispanic media outreach director Rafael Prieto Zartha traced a kind of family tree for the origins of the planned march. These include the farm workers’ movement, the mass immigration demonstrations of 2006, and the world’s most famous civil rights speech, also delivered at the National Mall.

“The stage for our demonstration will be the area holding the nation’s monuments, where civil rights martyr Martin Luther King pronounced his unforgettable ‘I Have a Dream’ speech nearly 47 years ago, during a demonstration called ‘March for Jobs and Freedom,’” wrote Prieto.

Shuya Ohno, spokesman for the Reform Immigration for America Campaign, also drew parallels between the Rev. King’s march on Washington, D.C. and next month’s demonstration.

In a recent interview with New America Media, Ohno said the Rev. King’s fusing of jobs and civil rights is similar to the point marchers want to make: that immigration reform would strengthen the country’s moral fiber and the economy.

Ohno described the demonstration “almost a unity march in a way” since it will bring together advocates focused on different parts of the immigration policy agenda. The issues include agricultural jobs, the proposed Dream Act, detention regulations, and worker rights.

The “March for America” sponsors all agree on a path to earned citizenship for the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, speedier family reunification, humane enforcement and workplace protections.

The March 21 action aims to pressure Capitol Hill and the White House, which have shown an unwillingness to take on immigration legislation.

For at least two years, prominent pro-immigration groups have been rolling out websites, social media, and text messaging to build a national base that can be mobilized to counteract vocal immigration restrictionists.

The “March for America” web-page, for example, has a map of groups caravanning to Washington, D.C. and a database searchable by zip code for those seeking a way to link up and protest.

“We need every immigration reformer we can get in (Washington) on the 21st,” wrote Rich Stolz, also of the Reform Immigration for America campaign, in a recent e-mail to supporters.

fter the hate incident, the Islamic Center modified the event to address the crime. An interfaith panel including leaders from Jewish and Christian congregations facilitated a discussion called “Nashville Stands with Muslim Community: Violence Against One Community Hurts Us All.”

fter the hate incident, the Islamic Center modified the event to address the crime. An interfaith panel including leaders from Jewish and Christian congregations facilitated a discussion called “Nashville Stands with Muslim Community: Violence Against One Community Hurts Us All.”

From Bolsavik.com
by Vu Hao Nhien

Escalating their opposition to gay and lesbian Vietnamese participating in the Tet Parade in Westminster, a group of Viet religious leaders and activists assert they will boycott the event, and several Catholic organizations have pulled out.

At a press conference Thursday morning, the Vietnamese group Hội Đồng Liên Tôn (Interfaith Council), who had planned to march in the parade, announced that they’re withdrawing.

The head of the group, Lutheran minister Tran Thanh Van, said, “We cannot participate if they (Vietnamese GLBT) are in the procession.” Rev. Tran said the Interfaith Council already sent in their withdrawal letter.

The Catholic representative on the council, Rev. Si Nguyen, said that he would be willing to acknowledge gay people, but not during Tet.

Said he, “During Tet, we don’t bring up ugly matters, anything unseemly in the family we hide it away, we only bring out what’s good.” He calls on “all the faithful” to stay away from Bolsa Avenue during the parade.

Garden Grove Councilmember Dina Nguyen attended the press conference, and spoke up. She said, “I don’t believe in homosexuality” (in Vietnamese: “Tôi không tin vào chuyện đồng tình [sic] luyến ái”). She didn’t explain any more about what she meant by that.

Nguyen also said that next year, she would “suggest to the City of Westminster to respect Vietnamese tradition.”

Which is something of a puzzler, because traditionally, Vietnamese may have misconceptions about gays, but they don’t exactly discriminate.

The most common misconception is that being gay is an illness. This mistaken belief showed itself at the Interfaith Council press conference through the Caodai representative Pham Van Kham, who said, “We are very sad to see our children fall victim to it” – referring to the supposed gay disease.

Other than such misconceptions, homophobia is new to Vietnam, and the country’s main religion Buddhism never made an issue out of homosexuality.

Here’s a comparison: The U.S., for example, used to have laws criminalizing gay sex, upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick (see summary here).

Ancient Vietnamese laws, however, never criminalized homosexual behavior, even as it did have a long list of sexual crimes – a fact noted by scholars Nguyen Ngoc Huy and Ta Van Tai in vol. 1 of their massive 3-volume work “The Lê Code: Law in Traditional Vietnam.” (The late Nguyen Ngoc Huy was a legal scholar, former dean of the University of Can Tho Faculty of Law, and a leader of Tan Dai Viet, one of the top political parties of South Vietnam. He also participated as a member of the South Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace Talks. He came to the US after the war and taught at Harvard Law School.)

Meanwhile, the LGBT groups that are in the parade are not pulling out. If anything, they’re more determined. On Facebook, someone has put up an invitation for the “Viet LGBT Contingent” to join the march. It has, however, so far drawn only 22 yes’s.

The four participating groups are: Sống Thật Radio; Ô-Môi; Gay Vietnamese Alliance; and the Vietnamese Lesbian and Bisexual Women Network and Friends.

For years I’ve been writing articles referring to the “12 million undocumented immigrants living in this country.”

But it turns out the number isn’t accurate any longer. The U.S. government has just announced that the undocumented immigrant population decreased to 11 million as of January 2009.

This announcement earned brief mentions today in major newspapers and websites, but it’s big news. Why?

Because it represents a historic reversal in a trend that has been underway for some time—a steady year-to-year increase in the country’s undocumented immigrant population. The shrinking of this population is proof the current economic recession has been a defining event in the country’s immigration history.

According to the data made public by the Office on Immigration Statistics, the U.S. undocumented immigrant population peaked in January 2007 at 11.8 million, had shrank by about 200,000 people a year later, and dropped even more sharply, by 800,000 people, to 10.8 million in January 2009.

That’s a reduction of 1 million people in two years. Some will argue this trend has a great deal to do with stepped up enforcement, and that may be true to some extent. But enforcement has been increasing for 15 years at least, beginning a few years into the Clinton administration, and it can’t be a coincidence that the undocumented immigrant population suddenly began contracting sharply as the economy started to cool in 2007-2008.

I expect that the figures for January 2010, when they’re released a year from now, will show a further drop in undocumented immigrant numbers. We may be reckoning with a population of 10 million undocumented immigrants heading into this decade.

This trend adds an arrow to the quill of immigration reform advocates who say now’s the time to revamp the nation’s immigration system—when there’s less pressure on the border and communities nationwide from an ongoing influx of undocumented immigrants. At the local and state level, the stabilization of this population will allow authorities to address the issue free of the alarmist climate sometimes caused when there are sudden immigration surges.

Still wondering why the Republican Party has become the party of “no”?

Could a move toward bipartisanship in Washington, D.C. offer the last-ditch chance at immigration reform in 2010?

As I worked on an article about immigration and the Tea Party movement this week, I also picked up some information on the temperature in the capital regarding the chances of immigration legislation advancing this year, ahead of the November 2010 midterms.

The big hope for reform advocates is that the wider effort by President Obama and Congressional leaders of both parties to find bipartisan common ground on front-burner issues like jobs will lead, down the line, to action on immigration too.

It is a “long-shot scenario,” said Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, a pro-immigration reform business grouping, in a phone interview earlier this week.

“It will take Obama making some much more limited proposals,” she added, “If they manage to come together on other things then they can take on immigration.”

However Washington, D.C.’s latest lurch toward bipartisanship, started by Obama and Republicans’ recent question-and-answer session in Baltimore, seemed to hit a roadblock today.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) said that financial legislation had hit Republican resistance and that bipartisan efforts to hammer out a common bill might have to be scuttled. Democrats might again go at it alone.

Perhaps that’s the end of the most recent attempt to bring the two parties together. But if it isn’t, might immigration wiggle its way into any overlap between the Dems and the GOP?

Immigration reform advocates still rated the odds as being stacked high. But they pointed out that immigration reform has a long history as a bipartisan issue.

Ronald Reagan, after all, achieved the last major immigration reform, in 1986. That bill have a chance at citizenship to over 2 million immigrants. More recently, Sen. John McCain, in 2007, co-sponsored immigration reform that ultimately failed.

New York Sen. Charles Schumer, the Democrats’ point person on immigration reform in the U.S. Senate, is said to be preparing the ground for a bill despite the gloomy economy and the risk of a backlash from opponents of more liberal immigration policies.

There is already an immigration reform bill in the House introduced by Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.).

“Immigration has more potential to be bipartisan than almost any other issue on the legislative agenda,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of pro-immigration group America’s Voice, in a press release.

The release was meant to discount insider talk that immigration reform was “dead” after Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts and Obama’s tepid mention of the issue in the State of the Union address.

We attended the same university and were shortly separated when Viet was in medical school and I completed medical school and left Michigan for residency. As soon as Viet completed medical school, we reunited.

What is aggravating is that Colin Powell who had helped scuttle Bill Clinton’s promise to end the gay ban in the military said in his eminently reassuring way that it’s OK now because there is increased “acceptance of gays and lesbians in society.”

The devastating earthquake in Haiti has focused the world’s attention on the island nation’s desperation and grinding poverty. To understand Haiti’s important role in modern history and its current problems and obstacles, NAM’s editor, Andrew Lam, spoke with Percy Hintzen, professor of African American Studies and the President of Caribbean Studies Association at UC Berkeley. Hintzen is the author of “Problematizing Blackness: Self-Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States.”

I think President Obama just killed comprehensive immigration reform.

If he did, he killed it gently, with a pat on the head. Actually to be fair, he did not kill it. He sent it to the back of the bus. Behind the gays and lesbians.

Vietnam’s antipathy toward free expression and other fundamental rights does not bode well for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which Vietnam now chairs, Human Rights Watch said. Vietnam has signed the ASEAN Charter, a legally binding agreement that commits member states to “strengthen democracy, enhance good governance, and protect and promote human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

yoti Basu was for over twenty years the Chief Minister of West Bengal, the longest serving Chief Minister in India. He was a dimunitive colossus who presided over a patchwork of Communist parties of various shades of red that had a stranglehold on West Bengal politics for most of the eighties and nineties.