New York City

Fire in New York City Apartment Kills 12, Injures Several Others

Mayor De Blasio said the death toll ranked as “one of the worst losses of life to a fire in many, many years” in the city.

New York fire department ladder trucks deploy at a building fire in the Bronx borough of New York City, New York, US December 28, 2017. Credit: NYFD/Handout via Reuters

New York: Twelve people were killed, including an infant, and four were critically injured on Thursday in a fire that swept through several floors of an apartment building in the New York City borough of the Bronx, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

The blaze started on the first floor of the brick building and quickly spread upstairs, city fire commissioner Daniel Nigro told reporters at a news conference with the mayor. The cause was under investigation.

De Blasio said the death toll ranked as “one of the worst losses of life to a fire in many, many years” in the city.

Four people were in hospital in critical condition “fighting for their lives,” the mayor said.

Authorities said firefighters rescued 12 people from the building.

“People died on various floors of the apartment, ranging in age from 1 to over 50,” Nigro told reporters. “In a department that is surely no stranger to tragedy, we’re shocked by the lives lost.”

Two of the dead were found in a bathtub, according to cable news station NY1.

“Hold your families close and keep those families here in the Bronx in your prayers,” de Blasio said in a message to New Yorkers.

The blaze erupted shortly before 7 pm in the Belmont section of the Bronx, a primarily residential, close-knit neighborhood known as the “Little Italy” of the borough, adjacent to the Bronx Zoo and Fordham University.

New York is going through a bitter cold snap with temperatures in the low-teens Fahrenheit and high winds, which according to one media account, stoked flames inside the building as residents flung open doors and windows.

Wherever fire hoses sprayed, the ground was covered with sheets of ice, according to an NY1 reporter.

One witness, Rafael Gonzalez, who lives across the street from the building, told television station WCBS-TV, an affiliate of CBS News, he saw some youths on a fire escape of the burning building as the fire raged.

“What woke me up was the smoke, because I thought it was my building,” he said.

No heavy damage to the exterior of the building was visible in news footage and photographs.

The New York City Fire Department said more than 160 firefighters responded to the four-alarm blaze.

Pictures posted on Twitter by the fire department showed two fire trucks with aerial ladders extended to the upper floors of a brick building bathed in flood lights, and firefighters on the fire escape outside what appeared to be a second- or third-floor unit.

The number of civilian fire fatalities in New York City last year dropped to 48, the fewest in the 100 years since record-keeping began, the FDNY said on its website.

Data on 2017 fire fatalities was not immediately available.

(Reuters)

Terror Charges Slapped on Times Square Bombing Accused

Ullah was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, supporting an act of terrorism, and making a terrorist threat under New York state law.

Suspect Akayed Ullah, Credit: New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission/Handout via Reuters

New York: US prosecutors on Tuesday brought federal charges against the suspect in Monday’s attempted suicide bombing in one of New York City’s (NYC) busiest commuter hubs, accusing him of supporting a foreign terrorist organisation.

Akayed Ullah, a 27-year-old Bangladeshi and self-described supporter of the radical group Islamic State (IS), was also charged in a criminal complaint with bombing a public place, destruction of property by means of explosive and use of a destructive device in a Manhattan district court.

Ullah planned to “murder as many human beings as he could … in support of a vicious terrorist cause,” acting US attorney Joon Kim told a news conference after filing the charges.

NYC police have said that Ullah set off a pipe bomb in an underground corridor of the subway system that connects Times Square to the Port Authority Bus Terminal at rush hour on Monday morning, injuring himself and three others.

He told police interviewers after the blast, “I did it for the Islamic State,” according to court papers filed by federal prosecutors.

Ullah began the process of self-radicalisation in 2014 when he started viewing pro-IS materials online and carried out his attack because he was angry over US policies in the Middle East, prosecutors said.

New York officials on Tuesday also filed state charges against Ullah, as investigators in his home country questioned his wife.

Ullah was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, supporting an act of terrorism, and making a terrorist threat under New York state law, the NYC police department said.

The federal charges, which are expected to take precedence over the state charges, carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Officials declined to disclose Ullah’s condition at Bellevue Hospital late on Tuesday. His first court appearance in the case could come as soon as Wednesday and may be conducted by video conference with a judge, a spokesman for the US Attorney’s office said.

On the morning of the attack, Ullah posted on his Facebook page, “Trump you failed to protect your nation.” Ullah’s passport, which was recovered from his home, had handwritten notes, including one that read, “O AMERICA, DIE IN YOUR RAGE.”

Homemade bomb

Investigators at the scene found a nine-volt battery inside Ullah’s pant pocket, as well as fragments from a metal pipe and the remnants of what appeared to be a Christmas tree light bulb attached to wires.

Ullah told investigators that he built the bomb at his Brooklyn home one week before the attack, filling the pipe with metal screws to maximise damage. He chose a workday to target as many people as possible.

Investigators in Bangladesh were questioning Ullah’s wife, according to two officials who declined to be identified as they were not permitted to publicly discuss the matter. They said the couple have a six-month-old son.

A police official who took part in that interview, who declined to be named as he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the wife told investigators that Ullah had never prayed regularly before he moved to the US.

NYC police and the FBI were leading the investigation into Ullah in conjunction with other agencies through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and were asking the public for any information about the suspect.

Investigators were poring through data on Ullah’s electronic devices, said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Assistant FBI director-in-charge William Sweeney said there was so far no indication that Ullah had previously attracted the attention of the FBI.

Ullah lived with his mother, sister and two brothers in Brooklyn and was a green card holder, said Shameem Ahsan, consul general of Bangladesh in New York.

US President Donald Trump said again on Tuesday that the attack emphasized the need for immigration reforms.

Monday’s incident occurred less than two months after an Uzbek immigrant killed eight people by speeding a rental truck down a NYC bike path in an attack for which IS claimed responsibility.

“There have now been two terrorist attacks in NYC in recent weeks carried out by foreign nationals here on green cards,” Trump said. “The first attacker came through the visa lottery, the second came through chain migration. We’re going to end both of them.”

The US Supreme Court last week allowed Trump’s latest travel ban, targeting people from six Muslim-majority countries, to go into full effect even as legal challenges continued in lower courts.

The ban covers people from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen seeking to enter the US. Trump has said the travel ban was needed to protect the US from terrorism by Islamist militants.

Bangladesh is not among the countries affected by the ban.

John Miller, the NYC police department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counter terrorism, said on Tuesday that police would review the attempted suicide bombing and adjust security plans for the upcoming new year’s eve celebrations in Times Square.

“This is the first time I believe that we have seen an individual with a suicide bomb in mass transit and actually have that bomb function. So we’re going to take a hard look at it,” Miller said in an interview.

(Reuters)

Uzbek Man Charged in the New York Attack Said He Was ‘Inspired’ by ISIS

Sayfullo Saipov confessed to authorities that he made a trial run with a rental truck on October 22 to practice turning the vehicle and “stated that he felt good about what he had done” after the attack.

Flowers for victims of Tuesday’s attack lay outside a police barricade on the bike path next to West Street a day after a man driving a rented pickup truck mowed down pedestrians and cyclists on a bike path alongside the Hudson River in New York City, in New York, US November 1, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton

New York: An Uzbek immigrant accused of ploughing a truck down a New York City bike path, killing eight people, told investigators he had been inspired by watching ISIS videos and began planning the attack a year ago, according to a criminal complaint filed against him on Wednesday.

Sayfullo Saipov, 29, who was hospitalised after he was shot by a police officer and arrested, confessed to authorities that he made a trial run with a rental truck on October 22 to practice turning the vehicle and “stated that he felt good about what he had done” after the attack, the complaint said.

The 10-page charging document said Saipov waived his rights to remain silent and avoid self-incrimination in agreeing to speak to investigators without an attorney present from his bed at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan.

In the course of that interview, the complaint said, Saipov told investigators he chose Halloween for the attack because he believed more people would be on the streets and said he had originally planned to strike the Brooklyn Bridge as well as the bike path on the western edge of lowerManhattan.

The complaint said Saipov had requested permission to display the flag of the ISIS militant group in his hospital room.

It said he was particularly motivated by seeing a video in which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who led the campaign by Islamic State – also known as ISIS – to seize territory for a self-proclaimed caliphate within Iraq and Syria, exhorted Muslims in the US and elsewhere to support the group’s cause.

Jeffrey Raven, 55, places the flags of Belgium and Argentina above flowers laid for victims of Tuesday’s attack outside a police barricade on the bike path next to West Street a day after a man driving a rented pickup truck mowed down pedestrians and cyclists on a bike path alongside the Hudson River in New York City, in New York, US November 1, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton

Investigators found thousands of ISIS-related propaganda images and videos on a cellphone belonging to Saipov, including video clips showing ISIS prisoners being beheaded, run over by a tank and shot in the face, the complaint said.

Separately on Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had located another Uzbek man, Mukhammadzoir Kadirov, 32, wanted for questioning as a person of interest in the attack. The FBI earlier had issued a wanted poster for Kadirov.

The assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, William Sweeney Jr, declined at a news conference to give any details on Kadirov or where he was found.

US law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing, told Reuters that Saipov had been in contact with Kadirov and another person of interest in the investigation, though they did not elaborate.

Eligible for death penalty

Saipov was charged with one count of providing material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organisation, specifically ISIS, and one count of violence and destruction of motor vehicles causing the deaths of eight people.

Manhattan acting US Attorney Joon Kim said the first count carries a maximum penalty of life in prison, while the second would make Saipov eligible for capital punishment if convicted. Additional or different charges could be brought later in an indictment, Kim said.

Vehicle assaults similar to the New York attack took place in Spain in August and in France and Germany last year, claiming dozens of lives.

Tuesday’s assault was the deadliest in New York City since September 11, 2001, when suicide hijackers crashed two jetliners into the World Trade Center, killing more than 2,600 people.

FBI agents and New York City Police Department (NYPD) investigate a pickup truck used in an attack on the West Side Highway in lower Manhattan in New York City, US, November 1, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid

Of those killed on Tuesday, five were Argentine tourists, who were among a group of friends visiting New York to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their high school graduation, one was a Belgian citizen, one was a New York resident and one lived in New Jersey.

Saipov allegedly used a pickup truck rented from a New Jersey Depot store to run down pedestrians and cyclists along a 20-block stretch of the bike path that runs along the Hudson River before slamming into a school bus.

According to authorities, he then exited his vehicle shouting “Allahu Akbar” – Arabic for “God is greatest” – and brandishing what turned out to be a paint-ball gun and a pellet gun before a police officer shot him in the abdomen.

Saipov lived in Paterson, New Jersey, a one-time industrial hub about 25 miles (40 km) northwest of lower Manhattan.

Wheelchair-bound suspect

Saipov, seated in a wheelchair, appeared for a brief hearing in Manhattan federal court Wednesday evening before Magistrate Judge Barbara Moses. A Russian interpreter translated for Saipov.

Saipov did not ask for bail and was remanded to federal custody. It was not immediately clear where he would be held.

Moses appointed public defence attorney David Patton to represent Saipov.

Patton asked Moses that she recommend that Saipov be given a wheelchair or cane while in custody. He said Saipov was in “a significant amount of pain” and asked that he be given treatment for that as well. Moses agreed to the requests.

Two senior US lawmakers on Wednesday urged authorities to treat Saipov as an enemy combatant, which would allow investigators to question him without having a lawyer present.

President Donald Trump said he would be open to transferring Saipov to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where other suspects including alleged September 11 plotters are held.

Kim, the federal prosecutor, said there was nothing about charging Saipov in civilian court that would necessarily prevent him from later being declared an enemy combatant. “That is a determination that will be made elsewhere,” he told reporters.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said police will be out in force to protect the city’s marathon on Sunday, one of the world’s top road races, which draws some 51,000 runners and 2.5 million spectators from around the globe.

(Reuters)

The Mental Health Toll of Puerto Rico’s Prolonged Power Outages

More than a month has passed since Hurricane Maria’s initial landfall in Puerto Rico, but around 80% of the island still remains without power.

Hurricanes and loss of power also lead to a loss of essential services for communities. Credit: Reuters

More than a month has passed since Hurricane Maria’s initial landfall in Puerto Rico, but around 80% of the island still remains without power.

As residents grapple with the immediate damage, it’s worth asking what the health effects will be over the long term. How do we identify those most vulnerable, and, with limited resources, tailor public health interventions?

I have studied various disasters’ effects on health, from the September 11 terrorist attack to Hurricane Sandy. Based on my studies of hurricanes and power outages, we can expect to see a number of lasting effects on Puerto Rico in the months ahead, including mental health issues.

Lasting impact

After Hurricane Sandy, the power was out for about 12 to 14 days, with variations across the eight affected counties in New York City.

We found that Hurricane Sandy had immediate effects on certain types of mental health problems. Residents reported more emergency department visits due to anxiety and mood disorder after the hurricane, compared to the same period, pre-Sandy.

Most emergency department visits due to mental health after Sandy involved substance abuse. This was especially true during the power outage. There were about 200 emergency department cases of substance abuse during Sandy and the blackout period, about four times as many as usual.

According to the data we’ve collected and are still analysing, the negative effects from Hurricane Sandy on certain mental health illnesses – such as mood disorder and substance abuse – lasted anywhere from three months to as long as one year after the disaster, depending on the county.

Why did the stress endure for so long? Hurricanes and loss of power also lead to a loss of essential services for communities – such as access to food, clean water, transportation and communication. Lasting home damage can induce anxiety and depression among the residents in the affected areas, especially for those with pre-existing mental health problems.

Puerto Rico is missing these basic services, making daily life more stressful and thus more likely to cause mental suffering over the weeks and months ahead.

Who’s affected?

Mental health issues reach all demographic groups. However, some seem to be more strongly affected by power outages than others.

During the Northeast blackout in 2003, which occurred over three hot August days, women and the elderly had 19% and 158% higher risks, respectively, for respiratory hospital admission than during the non-blackout period.

Our research suggests that socioeconomic status also significantly influences people’s susceptibility to adverse mental health after a disaster. Generally, groups of low socioeconomic status are more susceptible to heat’s impact. But, when that heat coincided with a blackout, we found that the trend reversed: Higher socioeconomic status groups were more likely to be hospitalised during a blackout.

Hospital admissions for respiratory diseases among high-income people significantly increased by 23% after the Northeast blackout. Our preliminary data also shows that whites had significantly higher rates of emergency department visits than black and Hispanic individuals after Hurricane Sandy.

Why? One possible explanation is that groups of high socioeconomic status are more likely to use nebulisers, air conditioners or other electric home aids. Their dependence on this equipment could make them more susceptible to a hurricane’s effect during a power outage.

What this means for Puerto Rico

It’s not easy to recover after an unexpected disaster.

Rebuilding the transmission and distribution network will be an enormous task. With the help of outside aid, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló hopes to restore electricity to half of the island by November 15 and to 95% of the island by the end of the year.

The power outage in Puerto Rico has already lasted almost four weeks, much longer than the blackout in New York City during Hurricane Sandy. We should expect to see a corresponding increase in disease – not only mental health issues, but also diseases that depend on electricity for treatment, such as renal failure, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Effective responses by different levels of governmental agencies are critical after a natural disaster. Public health officials need to monitor consequent mental health cases. A medical monitoring or surveillance program to follow up with the long-term health impacts would also be beneficial to the local residents.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Migrants Need Social Citizenship Rather Than Just a Sanctuary

Migration is part of the identity of a society and contributes to the economy, yet migrants are treated as less than permanent residents.

Mulberry Street, Little Italy, New York, c1900. Courtesy Wikipedia

In 1975, the English author John Berger wrote about the political implications of immigration, at a time when one in seven workers in the factories of Germany and Britain was a male migrant – what Berger called the ‘seventh man’. Today, every seventh person in the world is a migrant.

Migrants are likely to settle in cities. In the United States, 20 cities (accounting for 36% of the total US population in 2014) were home to 65% of the nation’s authorised immigrants and 61% of unauthorised immigrants. In Singapore, migrant workers account for 20% of the city-state’s population. (Migrants continue to be a significant rural population. In the US, three-quarters of farm workers are foreign-born.)

Scholarship on migration tends to focus normative arguments on the national level, where policy concerning borders and immigration is made. Some prominent political philosophers – including David Miller at Nuffield College, Oxford, and Joseph Carens at the University of Toronto – also outline an account of ‘social membership’ in receiving societies. This process unfolds over five to 10 years of work, everyday life and the development of attachments. As Carens writes in ‘Who Should Get In?’ (2003), after a period of years, any migrant crosses a ‘threshold’ and is no longer a stranger. This human experience of socialisation holds true for low-wage and unauthorised migrants, so a receiving society should acknowledge that migrants themselves, not only their economic contributions, are part of that society.

Carens and Miller apply this argument to the moral claims of settled migrants at risk of deportation because they are unauthorised or because the terms of their presence are tightly limited by work contracts. In the US, for example, most of the estimated 11.3 million people who crossed a border without authorisation or are living outside the terms of their original visas have constituted a settled population for the past decade, with families that include an estimated 4 million children who are US citizens by birthright. InThe Ethics of Immigration (2013), Carens writes that the prospect of deporting young immigrants from the place where they had lived most of their lives was especially troubling: it is ‘morally wrong to force someone to leave the place where she was raised, where she received her social formation, and where she has her most important human connections’. Miller and Carens concur with the Princeton political theorist Michael Walzer’s view of open-ended guest-worker programmes as ethically problematic. The fiction that such work is temporary and such workers remain foreign obscures the reality that these migrants are also part of the societies in which they live and work, often for many years, and where they deserve protection and opportunities for advancement.

Not all migrants will have access to a process leading to national citizenship or permanent legal residence status, whether this is because they are unauthorised, or their immigration status is unclear, or they are living in a nation that limits or discourages immigration while allowing foreign workers on renewable work permits. If we agree that migration is part of the identity of a society in which low-wage migrants live and work, whether or not this is acknowledged by non-migrants or by higher-status migrants, what would it mean to build on the idea of social membership and consider migrants as social citizens of the place in which they have settled? And what realistic work can the idea of social citizenship do in terms of improving conditions for migrants and supporting policy development?

Social citizenship is both a feeling of belonging and a definable set of commitments and obligations associated with living in a place; it is not second-class national citizenship. The place where one’s life is lived might have been chosen in a way that the nation of one’s birth was not; for a Londoner or a New Yorker, local citizenship can be a stronger identity than national citizenship. Migrants live in cities with a history of welcoming immigrants, in cities that lack this history, and also in cities where national policy discourages immigration. Considering how to ensure that social citizenship extends to migrants so that they get to belong, to contribute, and to be protected is a way to frame ethical and practical questions facing urban policymakers.

Considering migrants as social citizens of the cities in which they settle is related to but not the same as the idea of the city as a ‘sanctuary’ for migrants. Throughout the US, local officials have designated ‘sanctuary cities’ for undocumented immigrants subject to deportation under policies announced by the federal government in February 2017. This contemporary interpretation of an ancient concept refers to a policy of limited local cooperation with federal immigration officials, often associated with other policies supporting a city’s migrant population. Canadian officials use the term ‘sanctuary city’ similarly, to refer to local protections and potentially also to limited cooperation with border-control authorities. In Europe, the term ‘city of sanctuary’ tends to refer to efforts supporting local refugees and coordinated advocacy for refugee admission and rights. These local actions protecting migrants are consistent with a practical concept of social citizenship in which civic history and values, and interests such as being a welcoming, diverse or growing city, correspond to the interests of migrants. However, the idea of ‘sanctuary’ suggests crisis: an urgent need for a safe place to hide. To become social citizens, migrants need more from cities than sanctuary.

Local policies that frame social citizenship in terms that apply to settled migrants should go beyond affirming migrants’ legal rights and helping them to use these rights, although this is certainly part of a practical framework. Social citizenship, as a concept that should apply to migrants and non-migrants alike, on the basis of being settled into a society, can build on international human rights law, but can be useful in jurisdictions where human rights is not the usual reference point for considering how migrants belong to, contribute to, and are protected by a society.

What can a city expect or demand of migrants as social citizens? Mindful that the process of social integration usually takes more than one generation, it would not be fair to expect or demand that migrants integrate into a new society on an unrealistic timetable. Most migrants are adults, and opportunities to belong, to contribute, and to be protected should be available to them, as well as to the next generation. Migrants cannot be expected to take actions that could imperil them or their families. For example, while constitutionally protected civil rights in the US extend to undocumented immigrants, using these rights (by identifying themselves publicly, for example) can bring immigrants to the attention of federal authorities, a reality or fear that might constrain their ability to participate in civic life.

In his novel Exit West (2017), Mohsin Hamid offers a near-future fictional version of a political philosopher’s ‘earned amnesty’ proposal. Under the ‘time tax’, newer migrants to London pay a decreasing ‘portion of income and toil’ toward social welfare programmes for longstanding residents, and have sweat-equity opportunities to achieve home ownership by working on infrastructure construction projects (the ‘London Halo’). Today, the nonfictional citizens of Berlin are debating how to curb escalating rents so that the city remains open to lower-wage residents, including internal and transnational migrants. A robust concept of social citizenship that includes migrants who have begun the process of belonging to a city, and those who should be acknowledged as already belonging, will provide a necessary framework for understanding contemporary urban life in destination cities.

Nancy Berlinger is a research scholar at the Hastings Centre in New York.

This article was originally published in Aeon Magazine.

At Least Ten Injured After Speeding Vehicle Strikes Pedestrians in New York’s Times Square

A witness said at least ten people were being treated for injuries on the ground after the collision.

Times Square. Credit: Reuters

New York: A speeding vehicle struck pedestrians on a sidewalk in New York City’s Times Square on Thursday, May 18, according to an announcement at nearby Reuters news agency headquarters.

The New York Police Department closed off the area.

A Reuters witness said at least ten people were being treated for injuries on the ground after the collision at the Midtown Manhattan tourist site.

Gender Beat: Indian Women Earn 25% Less Than Men; US Supreme Court Scraps Transgender Bathroom Case

A round-up of what’s happening in the worlds of gender and sexuality.

Seven year old twins Shahana (R) and Shahala (L) walk to their school in Kodinji village in the southern Indian city of Kerala July 28, 2009. REUTERS/Arko Datta/Files

Two girls walk to their school in Kodinji village in Kerala. Credit: Reuters/Arko Datta/Files

Campaign launched to provide underprivileged girls with reusable, anti-bacterial sanitary protection

While some countries around the world are considering an official ‘period policy’ to allow female employees to avail time off during their period, millions of girls and women across India are being forced to sit out because of it.

What for many is a necessity (access to tampons or sanitary pads during their period), remains a luxury for 88% of girls and women in India due to a lack of affordability, claims a study conducted by AC Nielsen.

In poor households, a mere 5% of the girls use pads. The rest, for about five days every month, resort to unsanitary alternatives like old fabric, rags or even husk sand.

Even if affordability is not the issue, and they manage to gain access to pads, the lack of a functioning toilet in 40% of government schools, where adolescent girls can change their pad, forces them to skip school.

Thus, 40 million girls miss school for five days each month and eventually, one in five girls ends up dropping out. According to a Forbes Marshall survey, which looked at sanitation as a whole, almost 23% of girls in India drop out of school when they start menstruating.

In India, 1 in 5 girls are forced to drop out of school because of their periods. You can change this. #GiveHer5 https://t.co/cN251nIOGZ pic.twitter.com/fy2FWRb6Wh

— Biswatosh Sinha (@biswatosh) March 5, 2017

A new campaign by the Ammada Trust – #GiveHer5 – has a straightforward but hard hitting aim – to give millions of girls those five days back. How it plans to do that is by allowing them access to an easier and cheaper alternative to sanitary pads – a 12-hour reusable sanitary protection. Dubbed as Saafkin, these ‘pads’ are bacteria and yeast killing, are washable and, hence, reusable.

The sanitary protection can be used for up to one year and costs Rs 150, which the campaign, which hit the ground on March 6, has called for people to donate in order to “change a life.”

In exchange for that donation, the campaign will ensure two of these reusable Saafkins to a girl through a network of NGOs.

According to their website, nearly 300 people have donated to the campaign till now.

Transgender Pakistani women beaten to death in Saudi Arabia

Two transgender women were reportedly beaten to death by police last week in Saudi Arabia after being arrested along with several other members of the community. According to Farzana Riaz of Trans Action Pakistan, the two women were packed in sacks before being beaten to death with sticks by the police, Reuters reported.

“We are deeply saddened by the deaths of these two innocent trans persons in Saudi Arabia,” Riaz said. “We request the Saudi government to release the information of the 35 transgender persons arrested; we want to know their details, under what charges were they arrested, what is their medical condition?”

According to Independent, a statement from the Saudi interior ministry, however, claimed that reports of the incident were “totally wrong and nobody was tortured”. However, it has been acknowledged that one Pakistani had died in custody following the arrest due to a heart attack.

Saudi Arabia does not have a law against transgender people, but according to Reuters, the Middle Eastern country has arrested people for cross-dressing. According to Human Rights Watch, the country has also ordered the flogging and imprisonment of men accused of behaving like women.

US Supreme Court scraps landmark transgender bathroom case

The Supreme Court on Monday did away with its initial plan to hear a major transgender rights case. It further threw out a lower court’s ruling in favour of a transgender Virginia student after the US president overturned an Obama-era policy protecting transgender youths under federal law.

According to a BBC report, Gavin Grimm, who was born female but now identifies as male, had filed a lawsuit against his school board over its policy preventing him from using the male bathroom.

The Supreme Court had scheduled a hearing for the case for March 28, however, the apex court has now reverted the case back to a lower court after the Trump administration issued new policy guidance concerning the case.

In late February, Donald Trump withdrew a federal guideline requiring transgender students to have access to bathrooms and locker rooms matching their gender identity. The guidelines were issued last May by the Obama administration to address the increasing concerns regarding the treatment of transgender students.

A sign is seen in the bathroom stalls at the 21C Museum Hotel in Durham, North Carolina in this May 3, 2016 file photo. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake/File photo

A sign is seen in the bathroom stalls at the 21C Museum Hotel in Durham, North Carolina in this May 3, 2016 file photo. Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Drake/File photo

“This is a mean-spirited attack on hundreds of thousands of students who simply want to be their true selves and be treated with dignity while attending school,” Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, told The Guardian. “These young people already face incredible hurdles in their pursuit of education and acceptance. With a pen stroke, the Trump administration effectively sanctions the bullying, ostracising and isolation of these children, putting their very lives in danger.”

“These young people already face incredible hurdles in their pursuit of education and acceptance. With a pen stroke, the Trump administration effectively sanctions the bullying, ostracising and isolation of these children, putting their very lives in danger.”

The appeals court had originally ruled in Grimm’s favour last April.

In a setback for transgender rights in the country, Trump’s new guidance now allows individual states to decide what bathroom facilities students may or may not use.

The proverbial glass ceilings still in place as women in India earn 25% less than men

A study conducted by Monster India on gender pay gap has revealed that Indian women earn 25% less than men. The gap has, however, declined by two percentage points from 27.2% in 2015, the study revealed.

In both 2014 and 2015, the average wage for male employees stood at Rs 288.7 per hour even as the wages of female employees fell by 4.2% in 2015 to Rs 210.2 per hour.

In 2016, waged for men shot up by Rs 57.1 – or 19.8% – to 345.8 per hour and for women by Rs 49.6 – or 17.9% – to Rs 259.8 per hour.

Representative image. Credit: Reuters

However, despite the nearly 18% increase, according to the study, on average women earn Rs 63.5 less than their male counterparts.

The survey of over 2,000 working women further claims that not only are women at a disadvantage when it comes to filling supervisory positions, but they are also underpaid by 30% when they hold these positions.

In the education and research sector, the gender wage gap stands at 15%, while the figure for the healthcare sector is 22.6%.

Among the challenges that working women in the country face are the inadequacy of safe transport facilities, lack of child care facilities and not being given responsibilities as per their calibre.

The women who were survey also listed the kind of discrimination that they faced in the workplace, including stereotypes that female employees are “unpredictable” (6.8%), not being considered for senior positions (14.7%), being titled “unnecessarily aggressive” if they are assertive (11.4%) and dealing with the stereotype that women are “too emotional” (13.6%).

Even as a majority of the women felt that the management of their companies stressed gender parity, they often failed to “walk the talk,” hence indicating the urgent need for implementation of pragmatic policies in order to bridge the gender pay gap.

Schools in New York City now required to address students by their preferred pronouns

A directive issued last week now requires the staff of New York City public schools to address students by their preferred pronouns. According to New York Daily News, the directive is one of several issued as part of a ten-page memo by the education department on transgender kids for use by school staff, students and families.

The guidelines also direct the staff on how to use non-binary pronouns like “they” or “ze” as well as how to support transgender students who might be experiencing bullying at school.

The rules further state that, “It is important for school staff, students and parents to be aware that transgender and gender-nonconforming students may be at a higher risk for peer ostracism, victimisation and bullying because of bias and/or the possibility of misunderstanding and lack of knowledge about their lives.”

According to Mic, the guidelines concerning transgender students are the latest that the city’s mayor, Bill De Blasio, has issued in support of transgender people and students. The city had previously started a subway campaign in June aimed at educating people about the rights of transgenders when it comes to access to public restrooms.

The guidelines issued by De Blasio, according to New York Daily News, also includes a list of terms that are appropriate for use in schools, such as cisgender – an adjective describing a person whose gender identity corresponds to their assigned sex at birth.

That’s it for this week! If you liked what you read, please consider subscribing to this weekly newsletter.

If you have any comments or suggestions on what could be carried in this column, write to me at amanat@cms.thewire.in.

A Tale of Two Elections: How Trump 2016 Echoed Modi 2014

Both campaigns revolved around illegal immigration, promises to bring about a change in governance and the demonisation of Islam.

Trump’s audacious bid for the US presidency struck an emotive chord in the minds of the sympathisers of the now-ascendant Hindu Right.

Home minister and senior BJP leader Rajnath Singh is not known to speak irresponsibly or out of turn. Therefore, his words at the ‘parivartan’ rally in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, following the declaration of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, deserve to be taken note of.

Trump, Singh said, had invoked the policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his presidential campaign. “Now he has become president. We should feel proud,” he said.

Modi gained global popularity through his foreign policies, he further argued. “This is the reason why a politician like Trump eulogised Modi’s image and agenda in order to boost his own prospects in the US presidential elections.”

The endorsement of Modi’s programmes by Trump – if it happened at all – took the form of an echo of Modi’s popular prime ministerial campaign slogan, “Ab ki baar, Modi sarkar”, which the US presidential aspirant deployed in a 30-second video message by saying “Ab ki baar, Trump sarkar”, directed at members of the Indian-American community.

The commercial, which ran at least 20 times a day on 20 different channels watched by the Indian-Americans, concluded with a crisp statement, “I am Donald Trump and I approve this message” along with a few tail-end excerpts of a speech he had delivered to the Republican Hindu Coalition.

In India, Trump’s audacious bid for the US presidency struck an emotive chord in the minds of the sympathisers of the now-ascendant Hindu Right and with the so-called Hindu Sena that operates from within a radical fringe position within that ideological formation, and which publicly held rites and rituals of sacred devotion to showcase its solidarity with Trump’s aspiration.

This was not a matter of surprise. Trump’s ultra-nationalist election platform, “Make America Great Again”, with its strong revivalist intonations, had a clear resonance with the Modi-led BJP campaign during the 2014 general election in India.

Modi’s repeated and relentless denunciation of India’s weak state under the Congress dispensation and his promise that if voted to power he would take on the enemies of the nation (read Islamic ‘terrorists’) – both internal and external – and his projection of the heady cocktail of cultural nationalism and national development as the panacea for all the ills of the nation, addressed the long-harboured anxieties of middle India that predominantly constitutes upper caste and middle class Hindus.

Through an extended period of economic stagnation, a poor investment climate and reduced job opportunities, the middle class Indian had become more and more resentful of the doles and subsidies that were being offered to the select ‘underprivileged’ sections of the population and perceived these measures to be measures of vote-bank appeasement.

Enter the Modi juggernaut with its claim to represent India as a whole, its eschewal of appeasement doctrines and an almost overnight erasure of the Hindu Hriday Samrat (The Emperor of Hindu hearts) profile of the ex-RSS pracharak. The formula worked miraculously and led to the BJP sweeping a historic 282 seats in the 543-seat Lok Sabha.

As journalist Rajdeep Sardesai summed it up later, “The 2014 election was, in the end, about the chhappan inch kee chhatti (56-inch chest) machismo of the politician from Vadnagar in Gujarat. To quote Right-wing columnist Swapan Dasgupta: ‘For some he was a modern-day Chhatrapati Shivaji who would finally make Hindus come into their own, to others he was the poor boy next door who had made it big in the ugly and cruel world of Delhi and to still yet others, he was the great liberator of the economy from sloth and socialist incompetence. What united these divergent strands was the belief that this victory would usher in proverbial happy days.'”

How has the Trump victory in 2016 been any different from the victory of Modi in 2014? Like Modi, Trump too exuded a no-nonsense, get-things-done approach. Come January, “all things will be possible,” his daughter, Ivanka Trump, had told her compatriots on the last night of the Republican Party convention. And Trump himself assured the crowd that since “nobody knew the system better than me… I alone can fix it.” A non-establishment person, he vowed to invade the establishment and turn it upside down. Just as Modi was an outsider to the administrative protocols of New Delhi in 2014, Trump is an outsider to the administrative protocols of Washington D.C. in 2016.

Both profess to carry the people’s mandate of their respective countries. But the nature and the trajectory of the change envisioned in both cases is highly questionable. Trump’s constant refrain – purposefully stoking the apprehensions of the white working classes in particular – about the threat posed by illegal immigrants to their livelihoods and lifestyles, often manifested itself in an idiom of extreme helplessness.

Thus, the immigrants were described as “flowing in like water,” an irresistible influx, to which the sole solution could be and should be to “take our country back” from them. The hero of this war-like repossession enterprise would be Trump and Trump alone. “Build a wall” hosts of excited supporters egged him on as he hyped up his rants.

Illegal immigration from across the borders featured prominently in Modi’s discourse as well. Among the BJP’s major election planks, deployed in states whose boundaries are adjoining those of Muslim-majority neighbours such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, has been to play up the dangers to the demographic equilibrium of society and to national security represented by the clandestine traffic of foreign nationals into the Indian territory.

This tactic of whipping up a fear-psychosis among naturalised citizens at the prospect of being swamped over by hordes of aliens is ironic in the light of the surreptitious measures being taken by the BJP government at the Centre to grant citizenship status to Hindus from other South Asian nations.

These steps, and the political assumptions attendant upon them, are a part of the Hindu Right’s old, old history of demonisation of Islam and all that Islam stands for. A virulent contemporary articulation of this prejudice came from Modi himself in the wake of the assault on the World Trade Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. Appearing on The Big Fight – an orchestrated debate that is aired once a week on NDTV – he made it plain that he would not beat around the bush. “It has taken an attack like 9/11 for India’s pseudo-secular media to finally use a term like Islamic terrorism…”

Was this not what Trump too was destined to say a mere 15 years down the line following another terrible terrorist strike in the US, this time in Orlando, Florida. “I refuse to be politically correct. I want to do the right thing. I want to straighten things out. I want to make America great again.”

Was this the shape of things to come that the poet W.B. Yeats predicted when he wrote:

“The best lack all conviction,

The worst are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand…?”

Tapan Basu is a member of the faculty at the Department of English at the University of Delhi.

Protests Continue On Day Five After Trump’s Victory

Protesters have decried Trump’s campaign rhetoric about illegal immigrants, Muslims, women, as well as allegations that he sexually abused women.

A woman holds a sign during a protest against President-elect Donald Trump. Credit: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters

New York: Demonstrators in major US cities took to the streets on Sunday for a fifth straight day to protest president-elect, Donald Trump, whose campaign manager said President Barack Obama and Democrat Hillary Clinton should do more to support a peaceful transition.

Following several nights of unrest, crowds of people marched in parks in New York City, San Francisco and Oakland, California, according to social media.

A few thousand joined a march at the south end of Manhattan’s Central Park, beginning at a Trump property on Columbus Circle and walking toward the real estate mogul’s skyscraper headquarters less than a mile (1.6 km) away.

They chanted: “Say it loud, say it clear, immigrants are welcomed here,” and held signs such as “White silence = violence” and “Don’t mourn, organise.”

One protester said demonstrators were reclaiming what the American flag he was holding stood for.

“The flag means freedom of speech, freedom of religion, equal protection under the law and other values like diversity, respecting differences, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press,” said Daniel Hayman, 31, of Seattle, who was in New York for work. “We’re trying to reclaim the flag and push forward those values.”

Thousands in several cities have demonstrated since the results from Tuesday’s election showed Trump, a Republican, lost the popular tally but secured enough votes in the 538-member Electoral College to win the presidency, surprising the world.

Largely peaceful demonstrators in urban areas have said Trump threatens their civil and human rights. They have decried Trump’s often inflammatory campaign rhetoric about illegal immigrants, Muslims and women, as well as allegations, which he denies, that the former reality TV star sexually abused women.

Dozens have been arrested, including 71 in Portland, Oregon on Saturday night, according to police and a handful of police injured.

‘Let’s make waves’

In San Francisco, on Sunday, about 1,000 people marched through Golden Gate Park toward a beach where they chanted: “Let’s make waves.” They held signs such as “I resist racism” and “Down with the Trumps.”

Across the bay in Oakland, thousands of protesters joined a festival-like atmosphere, holding peace signs and blowing soap bubbles in the sunshine. Many had brought their children, aiming to hold hands around the 3.4-mile (5.5-km) circumference of Lake Merritt in a popular urban park.

Civil rights groups have monitored violence against US minorities since Trump’s win, citing reports of attacks on women in Islamic headscarves, of racist graffiti and of bullying of immigrant children. They have called on Trump to denounce the attacks.

Trump said he was ‘so saddened’ to hear of instances of violence by some of his supporters against minorities, according to a transcript released on Sunday of an interview with the CBS program 60 Minutes.

‘This man is our President’

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, said on Fox News on Sunday that she was sure many of the protesters were paid professionals, although she offered no proof.

Suggesting a double standard, Conway said on NBC’s Meet the Press that if Clinton had won the election and Trump supporters had protested, “people would be freaking out that his supporters were not accepting election results.”

“It’s time really for President Obama and Secretary Clinton to say to these protesters: ‘This man is our president,'” she said.

Republican House of Representatives speaker, Paul Ryan, told CNN on Sunday that protests were protected by the First Amendment as long as they were peaceful.

Neither Obama nor Clinton has called for an end to the protests. Obama told Trump at the White House on Thursday that he was going to help Trump succeed, “because if you succeed, then the country succeeds.”

Clinton told supporters at a New York hotel on Wednesday: “Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.”

Trump on Sunday attacked the New York Times for coverage he said was “very poor and highly inaccurate.”

“The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologising for their BAD coverage of me. I wonder if it will change – doubt it?” Trump wrote on Twitter.

The newspaper published a letter in Sunday’s editions from publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Dean Baquet, not apologising, but thanking readers for their loyalty and asking how news outlets underestimated Trump’s support.

The Times plans to “hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly” during the Trump presidency, they wrote.

(Reuters)

How a $50 Homemade Sensor Could Change the Way We Fight Urban Heat

“The coolest thing about the Harlem Heat Project is how people experience the heat using these custom-made sensors.”

The sensor at the heart of the Harlem Heat Project. Its parts cost $50 to source and about two hours to piece together. Source: Adam Glenn

New York: “#117 is back with me. The host has been traveling,” Carlos Jusino says to his colleague while I hang around hoping to chat with him about a tiny contraption in his hand. We are standing on polished wooden floors in the basement of the 21st Century Academy for Community Leadership, a glass fronted building that looks entirely out of place on 152nd Street in Harlem, New York city. Some community members are here to attend a meeting about participatory budgeting and have just broken off into little groups to brainstorm based on which part of Harlem they reside in.

Harlem, a large neighbourhood in the northern part of Manhattan, is one of the worst places to spend the summer in the megacity. It has a high concentration of brick, concrete and asphalt structures. All these materials trap heat during the day and keep the mercury high at night. I read that in a report on WNYC’s site, a public radio station in New York. And among several startling facts about the “heat vulnerability” of Harlem, which is populated mostly by African Americans, is this: “Twice as many people from Central Harlem visit the emergency room for heat stress each year compared to the rest of the city.”

The day I met Jusino, the temperature was up in the “high eighties” as New Yorkers say (between 30º and 35º C), so we found a cool corridor near the stairwell to have a chat about the ‘Harlem Heat Project.’ Jusino is the IT guy for the Harlem-based ‘WE ACT for Environmental Justice’ and got roped into this project for his technical skills. He’s holding a two-centimetre-long sensor in his palm.

“The sensor itself is in three parts,” he begins. “A lithium polymer battery, a central micro-controller and a temperature and humidity monitor.” In all, the device is the size of a thumb with parts soldered onto a circuit board. Every component had been purchased from a hobby electronics website by John Keefe, the data news editor at WNYC. The parts for each sensor add up to $50, and took less than two hours to put together.

“Most of it was done by John,” says Jusino. “He even had a soldering party where people who knew how to solder or those who wanted to learn could come along. It was like a ‘Do it Yourself’ kit and the idea is to put together a cookbook of sorts so people can make their own sensors at home,” he says. The code is available freely on GitHub. It’s currently programmed in a way that wakes up the sensor every 15-20 minutes, checks the temperature and humidity around it, then writes down the data onto a little memory card along with the time of the measurement, and goes back to sleep.

“We wanted to tighten our focus to a neighbourhood and understand better at a community level about how heat affects people,” Adam Glenn, editor of Adapt NY, one of the partners on the project, had told me the day before I met Jusino. “Heat is a silent killer and we wanted look at ‘urban heat islands’, which are pockets within any city and are often not very well documented. There is very little data on indoor air temperatures and how it’s harmful to people’s lives.”

Essentially, how do people cope with the heat indoors? “Here was a public health crisis in the making and this project helps provide data that can affect change and help the community affect change. The city authorities acknowledged that they don’t have the kind of neighbourhood-specific data to understand what was happening in sections of the city.”

So, 30 odd-looking sensors went to live in different parts of Harlem and Washington Heights for the first time this summer. Many were hosted around 150th street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenues. Like on Diane Lane-Hyman’s night stand in her three-storey walk-up on 150th street. The elderly Diane is both a ‘host’ and an ‘ambassador’, which is how the project has been organised. Core ambassadors are connected to hosts and can be hosts themselves. They go to their individual hosts, know them personally, pick up data from sensors, and ask them a few questions about how they’ve been doing.

“We also want to collect people’s personal stories on how they are coping with the heat and match that with internal temperature data that is collected by the sensor and also the external satellite data that is collected from NASA satellites,” Jusino says.

While the main experiment was to work with the community on the placement of sensors, the team also picked up metadata on things like the type of building: was it a brownstone or a high rise; the orientation: is it south facing or east facing; presence of an air-conditioner, which would help scientists analyse the data within context; and so forth. However, Glenn had pointed out to me that going forward the project will have to “establish its own ground team to collect data rather than have ambassadors do it. He thinks “the biggest challenge has so far been the community engagement part of the project.”

It’s a pilot “research project” for now, centred around those community members who offered to volunteer for the project. “The coolest thing about the Harlem Heat Project is how people experience the heat using these custom-made sensors. A lot of people die because of heat ailments and mortality in general goes up in these heat wave situations,” says Prathap Ramamurthy, an assistant professor at the City College of New York and an informal advisor to the project. His research involves urban climate and urban heat islands.

“As a physical scientist, I am keen to understand how the building really modulates the climate and on an average summer day, even if you see temperature fluctuations outside, the average temperature inside buildings ends up being the same all day long.”

Ramamurthy is from Chennai, India. He believes such a project can be adapted to urban areas in India, too, especially given the huge numbers who fall prey to heat waves. “India is experiencing rapid urbanisation that is pulling people into cities with no concept of how it will affect temperatures. The construction that has been happening in urban spaces has amplified temperatures a lot,” he says. “The thing about India is that instead of engaging the government, a lot of private entities might be willing to do these kind of things using sensors that don’t even cost that much money.”

Jusino told me he is eager to see how years two and three go. “Imagine, by year three we could have 200 sensors on the ground with real time data.” The tech will evolve too. “The next generation of this sensor is going to be connected to a GSM network so it can send the data wirelessly through a cellular network to a central data warehouse. Though the board will be more expensive, the hope is that we can set up sensors in certain highly impacted hosts.”

“And say our host is very elderly and the temperature and humidity gets above a certain level – you can potentially receive a warning where we can pick up the phone, call the person to check on them and make sure they are drinking enough water and have someone to help them out and let them know of a cooling centre nearby.”

Since the last week of August, the sensors are being picked up by Jusino or dropped off by hosts for the data to be downloaded and analysed in WE ACT’s office in Harlem. The project’s partners will get together in the fall with community members to discuss what can be done to mitigate heat illness in Harlem. Two of the sensors that have come back with the hottest temperatures were actually in the public housing tenements. “There is also a parallel project that has been running for three years now called ‘Heat Seek’, which is the opposite, where sensors are used to identify how cold it gets within homes during the winter. So we could work towards connecting these two projects in the future.”

One short-term goal is to iron out some absurd data that Jusino has had to grapple with this year. “Some of the hosts are elderly and they end up picking up the sensor and bringing it in after a long walk around the neighbourhood to pick up groceries, so there is a little bit of a disconnect between what the sensor is actually doing and how it should remain stationary in their homes.” Ideally somewhere in the bedroom.

“We advise that the sensors are placed somewhere high up away from small hands… We had one sensor fly out the window because a kid got to it and another host misplaced her sensor and for about two weeks we were collecting data from inside her car!”

Sowmiya Ashok is an independent journalist based in New York. She tweets at @sowmiyashok.