It has never been easy to get asylum in the US, but during the last two years it has become almost impossible. The Trump administration has closed the border to asylum seekers, denied detainees access to a judge, cut off food benefits, added application fees and just last week announced a rule that will shunt affirmative asylum cases (those opened outside of deportation proceedings) to the immigration courts, where the process is quick, adversarial and even more likely to result in deportation.
Bev Craig, leader of Manchester City Council before she was comfortably elected last week to replace Andy Burnham as mayor, has promised to build fifty thousand affordable homes over the next thirteen years. This would be a doubling of the rate at which they were built between 2016 and 2023, an impressive feat in the abstract, but not enough to address the scale of the problem, especially if few are offered for social rent.
Ten days ago, Andy Burnham stood outside Number 10 and announced a ‘circuit breaker for Britain, bringing forward the biggest changes in the last forty years’. One thing that won’t change is the use of British bases by American military aircraft bombing Iran.
Narendra Modi has had his hand forced by a group of meme-making students and members of the Indian working class. It began with an insult. In May, the Chief Justice of India called the unemployed youth of the country ‘cockroaches’. Abhijeet Dipke, a Dalit university student finishing a master’s degree in Boston, responded: ‘What if all cockroaches come together?’
The current Ebola outbreak was first reported in Ituri on 5 May. Ten days later laboratory analysis confirmed the presence of Bundibugyo virus, one of the four orthoebolaviruses known to cause disease in humans (two others have also been identified). Since then there have been more than 2500 confirmed cases and over a thousand deaths. This is the third known outbreak of Bundibugyo virus disease, and by far the worst.
James ‘Fergie’ Chambers, a US citizen, was detained by Spanish police on Ibiza earlier this month. He was visiting the Balearic island with his family with a possible view to moving there from their current home in Ireland. He’s now in prison in Madrid, as the Spanish government begins to comply with a US extradition request. The US Justice Department has accused Chambers of funding Hamas, proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the US since 1997. If the Spanish authorities agree to his extradition, it will have a chilling effect on organising for Palestine and other socialist causes.
Occasionally when the phone rang at the London Review offices in the late 1990s it would be the operator asking if we’d accept a reverse charge call from Bill Johnson in Johannesburg. The first couple of times I checked with a colleague if it was OK to take it. After that I’d just say yes, put it on hold and call across the office to Mary-Kay Wilmers: ‘Big Bill’s on the phone.’ I never thought to ask where R.W. Johnson got his nickname; it certainly suited his voice. Yesterday the paper got an email from his son to say that Johnson had died at home in Cape Town. He was 82.