Phyllis Scherrer

Vojtko in the cafeteria of UPMC Mercy, November 2012.

At her funeral, the beloved professor was so poor that she was “laid out in a simple, cardboard casket devoid of any handles for pallbearers.”

The September 1 death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, 83, an adjunct professor who taught French for 25 years at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shines a spotlight on the deplorable conditions faced by adjunct professors nationwide and the crisis in higher education as a whole.

As an adjunct professor, Ms. Vojtko was paid $3,000 to $3,500 per three-credit course she taught. When she could teach a full load, three courses in the fall and spring and two over the summer, she was not even clearing $25,000 a year. She had no job security, no medical benefits and no pension from the university.

In contrast, the university charges more than $30,000 per year for their least expensive Liberal Arts degree, and the salary of Duquesne’s president is more than $700,000 a year plus full benefits.

Over the past year, the university had reduced her teaching load to one class per semester, meaning that she was earning less than $10,000 a year, which was consumed by out-of-pocket expenses associated with cancer treatment she was receiving. Penniless, she was not able to keep her home in repair, and the utilities were cut off.

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Stephen Lendman

It's hard giving thanks when you're hungry. It's harder living in the world's richest country. It's harder still knowing government officials don't care. It's hardest of all wondering how you'll get by. It's increasing in America at a time trillions of dollars go for warmaking, corporate handouts, and other benefits for rich elites. More below on growing hunger and deprivation.

Giving thanks predated the republic. In 1621, Plymouth Pilgrims did so. They had nothing to do with originating the idea. Native Americans did. They gave thanks for annual fall harvests. They did it centuries before settlers arrived.

On November 26, 1789, George Washington proclaimed the first national thanksgiving day. He called it "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty God."

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln used the occasion to boost Union Army morale and patriotic fervor. He "invite(d) (his) fellow citizens to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens." He "fervently implore(d) the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of he nation and to restore it to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union." He didn't live long enough to see it.

Government officials today exploit Thanksgiving. They promote the illusion of US exceptionalism, moral and cultural superiority. Social inequality, moral degeneration, and police state lawlessness reflect today's reality. Constitutional rights don't matter. War on humanity persists. Corporate crooks go unpunished. Democracy is a convenient illusion. Powerful monied interests run things. Ordinary people are hugely deprived. Growing needs go unaddressed. Government officials able to make a difference don't care.

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John Chan

The global crisis of capitalism is greatly exacerbating the tensions between the rival powers that erupted in the barbarism of World War I.

Tensions continued to rise in the East China Sea yesterday after Japan and South Korea dispatched military aircraft into China’s newly demarcated “air defence identification zone” (ADIZ). Both the Japanese and South Korean governments, following the lead of the US administration, declared that their aircraft would ignore Chinese instructions to submit flight plans, identify their nationality and maintain radio contact.

Having provocatively declared the ADIZ last weekend, China is now confronting continuing challenges from the US and its allies. On Tuesday, the US flew two B-52 bombers into the zone from its air base in Guam without following Chinese procedures. US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel publicly declared that the US would back Japan in any conflict with China over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, which Beijing included in its ADIZ.

Facing nationalist criticism at home for failing to enforce the ADIZ, the Chinese government sent an early warning aircraft and several advanced Su-30 and J-11 fighter jets to patrol the air zone. A Chinese air force spokesman insisted the move was “a defensive measure and in line with international common practice.”

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Vincent Di Stefano

Every artist, musician and scientist worth their salt knows that the only way to make anything of worth truly their own is through repetition. Archers, footballers, sabreurs and chess players also know this to be axiomatic. Meditators, dancers, surgeons and healers all understand that without constant repetition, one’s level of focus, attention and skill inevitably drop away.

Yet the present time conspires to have us all believe that transience is the new value by which we are to live. This is reflected in the acceptance of inevitable obsolescence in virtually all the fruits of technology; in the seamless daily media reports of crisis after crisis with little or no reflection, reconsideration or remembrance of the waves of influence that both create and reverberate from such crises; and in the obsession with speed and curtness of delivery that characterises our newly developed forms of electronic communication.

Mobile phone texting is creating new lexicons and grammars, while email has reduced textual communication to verbal transactions phrased in minimalist vocabularies. We have become travellers on an ocean of information that endlessly washes and occasionally storms through our lives. And if we are to accept conventional wisdom, it is all relevant. For today, at least. Tomorrow will bring its own new waves of relevance, and today’s relevancies will be forgotten.

One of the consequences of this popular enshrinement of transience and ephemerality is a deepening loss of connectedness with our own origins and even with the definitive experiences of our age. Some school teachers still take it upon themselves to transmit a remembrance of the profound calamity that befell Europe during the Second World War in the hope that their students will come to realise the undermining and overturning of all values that occurred under Hitler’s Third Reich. Yet for so many young people, Vietnam, Cambodia, Timor and Lebanon are simply names of distant places. Something happened in Gaza five years ago, and something else happened there around this time last year, but that was way back then.

Without consciously cultivating a sense of memory and duration, we too easily fall into a soporific drifting through time. We shrug our shoulders at the hopelessness of it all, disconnect ourselves from the lived realities that assail others and are benumbed to the images of pain and calamity that daily irrupt into the popular media.

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Ellen Brown

“Control oil and you control nations. Control food and you control the people.” - US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger

Global food control has nearly been achieved, by reducing seed diversity with GMO (genetically modified) seeds that are distributed by only a few transnational corporations. But this agenda has been implemented at grave cost to our health; and if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) passes, control over not just our food but our health, our environment and our financial system will be in the hands of transnational corporations.

Profits Before Populations

According to an Acres USA interview of plant pathologist Don Huber, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, two modified traits account for practically all of the genetically modified crops grown in the world today. One involves insect resistance. The other, more disturbing modification involves insensitivity to glyphosate-based herbicides (plant-killing chemicals). Often known as Roundup after the best-selling Monsanto product of that name, glyphosate poisons everything in its path except plants genetically modified to resist it.

Glyphosate-based herbicides are now the most commonly used herbicides in the world. Glyphosate is an essential partner to the GMOs that are the principal business of the burgeoning biotech industry. Glyphosate is a “broad-spectrum” herbicide that destroys indiscriminately, not by killing unwanted plants directly but by tying up access to critical nutrients.

Because of the insidious way in which it works, it has been sold as a relatively benign replacement for the devastating earlier dioxin-based herbicides. But a barrage of experimental data has now shown glyphosate and the GMO foods incorporating it to pose serious dangers to health.

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John W. Whitehead

“Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.” — Daniel Webster

I will be the first to acknowledge that there is much to be thankful for about life in America, especially when compared to those beyond our borders whose daily lives are marked by war, hunger and disease. Despite our kvetching, grumbling and complaining, most Americans have it pretty good compared to less fortunates the world over.

Still, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that all of our so-called blessings will amount to little more than gilding on a cage if we don’t safeguard the freedoms on which this nation was founded, freedoms which have historically made this nation a sanctuary for the oppressed and persecuted. And if there is one freedom in particular need of protecting right now, it is the Fourth Amendment, which has been on life support for quite some time.

It used to be that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which enshrines the rights to free speech, free press, assembly, religious exercise and petitioning one’s government for a redress of grievances, was considered the most critical of the amendments in the Bill of Rights. Since writing my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, however, I have come to believe that the Fourth Amendment, which demands that we be “secure” in our persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government and, consequently, stands as a bulwark against the police state, is, in fact, the most critical.

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Jim W. Dean

The recent breakthrough in the Iran-Sextet nuclear talks, a geopolitical earthquake in itself, has also brought on many interesting aftershocks which could usher in a New World Order much different than the one normally associated with the term.

The fight leading up to the Sunday night success has revealed the battle lines more clearly than ever before who the real threat has been all along.

Israel deployed a full scale assault on America and the world, attempting to strangle the peace baby in its bed. Sure, we had the usual Congressional shills shaming America as they went through their sock puppet talking points recitations. Americans are used to having this humiliation.

But this time the Zionist lobby lead with their A-team, the senior senators who have long worked hand in glove with Israeli intelligence operatives to perpetrate a long running psychological operation on the American people. This is a treasonous act but they unfortunately have immunity for it.

The Israelis, especially Netanyahu, have been running the ‘Iran is about to have the bomb’ scam for twenty years. In the early years they were wrong, the middle years wrong, and in what I call the current ‘red line’ years even more so. Why did they keep spouting this garbage out when it was proven wrong time after time?

The answer is that their intelligence operations have so infiltrated American media, government and the think tank pundits, they have bullet proofed Israel from any loss of credibility consequences whatsoever. Promoting Israeli lies and deceptions became just another day at the office for their American 5th column. They even turned the deception game around to falsely accuse the Iranians.

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Bill Van Auken

This will continue: Villagers look at the bodies of three children
after they were killed in an airstrike by U.S. troops in Arghandab
district of Kandahar, south of Kabul, on Wednesday. Four local
civilians including three children were killed. (Photo: B. Nadim)

Now Washington is embarked on permanent occupation and for much the same motives that it attributed to the Soviets.

Susan Rice, the Obama administration’s national security adviser, issued an ultimatum Monday to Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai: either sign a bilateral security agreement with Washington immediately, or face the withdrawal of all US military forces and a cutoff of Western funding by the end of 2014.

The exercise in mutual brinksmanship by US imperialism and its Afghan puppet continued to unfold during Rice’s secretly organized visit to Kabul. In his late-night meeting with Rice, Karzai not only insisted that he would not sign any deal until after elections next April to choose his successor, but also conditioned any agreement on demands that the US not interfere in these elections, act to further peace talks with the Taliban, and release 17 Afghan prisoners held at the Guantanamo detention camp. He also reiterated his demand that the US military halt all raids on Afghan homes.

The written response issued by the White House was blunt: “Without a prompt signature, the US would have no choice but to initiate planning for a post-2014 future in which there would be no US or NATO troop presence in Afghanistan.” Rice, the statement continued, “stressed that we have concluded negotiations”—meaning Washington will not consider any new demands from Karzai—and warned that delaying the signing of the accord until next April “is not viable.”

The national security adviser also spelled out that a withdrawal of US troops would lead to a cutoff of hundreds of billions of dollars in US funding upon which the Afghan government and US-organized security forces are wholly dependent. The US political establishment and media refer to this as the “zero option,” which generally is portrayed as unthinkable, while Karzai himself is painted as a madman for even risking such an outcome.

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A Short Comment By Tony Cartalucci

"...any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal." - Brookings Institution's 2009 "Which Path to Persia?" report, page 52.

Written years ago, as the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel were already plotting to overrun Iran's neighbor and ally Syria with Al Qaeda to weaken the Islamic Republic before inevitable war, this quote exposes fully the current charade that is the "Iran nuclear deal."

The West has no intention of striking any lasting deal with Iran, as nuclear capabilities, even the acquirement of nuclear weapons by Iran was never truly an existential threat to Western nations or their regional partners.

The West's issue with Iran is its sovereignty and its ability to project its interests into spheres traditionally monopolized by the US and UK across the Middle East. Unless Iran plans on turning over its sovereignty and regional influence along with its right to develop and use nuclear technology, betrayal of any "nuclear deal" is all but inevitable, as is the war that is to shortly follow.

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Tom Carter

A top secret National Security Administration (NSA) strategy document leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden envisions spying on “anyone, anytime, anywhere,” free from all legal restraints, and radical expansions in the NSA’s activities in the period of 2012-2016.

The five-page document dated February 23, 2012, which was published by the New York Times on Saturday, is entitled “SIGINT Strategy 2012-2016.” The name of the author does not appear on the document, nor is it clear who was responsible for it.

Among the document’s central themes is that the law has “not kept pace” with the NSA’s “mission.” Translated into plain English, this means that the NSA is knowingly engaged in illegal activity.

The NSA’s strategy is to remedy this situation by campaigning for what amounts to the abolition of basic constitutional rights. Existing law must be “adapted,” the document states, in order to facilitate unlimited spying. “For SIGINT [signals intelligence] to be optimally effective, legal, policy, and process authorities must be as adaptive and dynamic as the technological and operational advances we week to exploit.”

In fact, the NSA’s spying activities—as well as the activities of the numerous other government agencies engaged in domestic spying—are in flagrant violation of the letter and spirit of the Fourth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights. This amendment protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” and provides that the government must obtain a warrant based on “probable cause” connecting a targeted person with criminal activity before a search or seizure can be carried out.

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Eric S. Margolis

In the late 1980’s, an old friend of mine based in Moscow was calling her husband in the USA late one night. She said it was a “typical dumb husband/wife call,” mostly about a broken garage door.

Around midnight, a gruff voice broke into the call. “This is your KGB listener. This is the most boring, stupid call I’ve ever listened to. Shut up and go to bed!”

Ah, those innocent Cold War days. Today, Big Brother listens to your calls, reads your email, and follows your internet searches on silent cat’s feet.

China’s Taoists warned, “you become what you hate.” They are right: the September 2001 attacks on the US, as John Le Carré wrote, producing a period of temporary psychosis. America was knocked back to the ugly days of Sen. McCarthy’s Red Scare of the 1950’s. The big difference was that today the bogeymen of “terrorists” have replaced menacing Marxists. And today, terrorists were everywhere.

When I enlisted in the US Army during the Vietnam War, we were taught that it was our duty as American soldiers to report all war crimes and violations of the Geneva Convention, and to refuse to obey unlawful orders from superiors as established at post WWII Nuremburg trials At the time, I was proud to serve in America’s armed forces.

Today, the military trial of document leaker PFC Bradley Manning has echoes of the Soviet era: a show trial in which a lonely individual is slowly crushed by the wheels of so-called military justice, an oxymoron.

The dramatic revelations of fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden brings back sharp memories of Soviet-era dissidents, jailed, banished, locked in foul psychiatric hospitals for daring to speak the truth.

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Philip Giraldi

Israel is a light that "...burns bright, upheld by the universal
principles of all civilized nations–freedom, democracy justice."
- Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada

It is hard to believe that even though 64% of the American public favors a negotiated settlement with Iran over its nuclear program fully 37% of those polled also believe that the United States actually needs Israel’s permission before coming to any kind of agreement. To paraphrase the late great Mitt Romney, is that a percentage that we will never be able to reach no matter how good the arguments are for "taking responsibility" and restoring American sovereignty in the area of foreign affairs? One has to suspect that the percentage consists mostly of the Christian-Zionists, who lately have been conducting a large scale "action alert" email campaign directed at Congress and the White House to force the cancellation of talks. They are perhaps heeding the demand of Harvard Professor and professional Israel apologist Alan Dershowitz that the "entire pro-Israel community must unite" to stop any agreement.

Tea Party Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas provided his own explanation for why "a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do" to the House of Representatives last Wednesday saying "There are many who have been aware of Scripture, and it has often been a guide in our relations with Israel. Some of us believe that the Bible is accurate. Certainly, so many prophesies have been fulfilled, and if that is true, this administration, unless they can find a verse that accurately says that those who betray Israel will be blessed, then this country is being dug in a deeper hole by this administration, and its betrayals of Israel’s trust and Israel’s friendship."

Gohmert, for all his sublime ignorance, is unfortunately not alone. By virtue of the evangelism and fine example set by the likes of Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin the scripture thumpers have escaped from the Bible Belt and are now to be found everywhere.

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Stephen Lendman

Washington didn't attack, invade and occupy Afghanistan to leave. Permanent occupation is planned.

NBC News headlined "Endless Afghanistan? US-Afghan agreement would keep troops in place and funds flowing, perhaps indefinitely," saying:

"While many Americans have been led to believe the war in Afghanistan will soon be over, a draft of a key US-Afghan security deal obtained by NBC News shows the United States is prepared to maintain military outposts in Afghanistan for many years to come, and pay to support hundreds of thousands of Afghan security forces."

"The agreement reflects an open-ended military commitment. It involves "thousands of American troops (and) billions of US taxpayer dollars."

Draft "Security and Defense Cooperation Agreement Between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan" provisions state in part:

"The Parties acknowledge that continued US military operations to defeat al-Qaeda and its affiliates may be appropriate and agree to continue their close cooperation and coordination toward that end."

America's Afghan war has nothing to do with defeating Al Qaeda or other nonexistent terrorist threats.

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Xymphora

Yesterday was one of those rare good days. Iran, the United States, and the world cheering for peace, and one nasty group united against peace on the other side. Moral clarity. It has never been more obvious where the wars come from.

Of course, the real negotiations are between the elected government of the United States and the real government of the United States, the Zionist Occupation Government, consisting of the Lobby, 99% of the media (I suppose you've noticed how the Jew-controlled media was trying to spin the agreement away by repeatedly insisting that the sides were too far away to possibly make a deal), and the Entertainment Industrial Complex (the last of which, of course, is also behind the ridiculously overreaching secret deals on intellectual property and criminalization of the use of the internet, as if you need anything else to be furious about).

The job of a successful American Administration is to frame these second negotiations, the real negotiations, in such a way that real American interests, and not solely the interests of a truly insane group of violent group supremacists who would not hesitate to blow up the entire world to steal another square millimeter of land, prevail. The deal provides almost no benefit to Iran except to put the world's real warmongers in the spotlight if the next six months don't produce a lasting agreement due to ZOG blocking.

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Keith Jones

Photo: At least eight persons were killed and several others injured in US drone attack on a seminary here on early Thursday morning. According to District Police Office (DPO) Iftikhar Ahmed, an unmanned US drone fired three missiles on a seminary near Degree College in tehsil Tal of Hangu district in Khyber. (Daily Mail)

A US drone strike on a seminary in the Hangu district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province killed at least six people Thursday, including several civilians.

The three-missile attack was only the second-ever US drone strike in Pakistan outside the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The previous such strike occurred in 2008.

Thursday’s attack came just one day after Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s chief foreign policy advisor, Sartaj Aziz, had told a parliamentary committee that Washington had pledged that it would not mount further drone strikes while Islamabad was holding peace negotiations with the Pakistan-based allies of the Afghan Taliban.

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William Bowles

I have been involved with left-wing politics in one guise or another pretty much my entire life and I have to admit to getting an awful lot of stuff wrong, largely because rather than thinking things through properly for myself, I listened to the ‘authority’, to those who allegedly know best.

Contrary to popular belief, I’ve gotten more radical as I’ve gotten older and as just as willing to consider new ideas, new approaches, perhaps due to my 19th century ‘liberal’ arts education that encouraged us to explore wherever our fancy took us, (though it has to be said that much depended on the quality/interest/encouragement of the lecturers we had and a pretty motley but interesting crew it was).

All of this by way of a run-in to this Mother Agnes Mariam affair that once again reveals the bankrupt nature of left political activity in this country (and elsewhere in the ‘developed’ world). If I remember correctly, Mother Agnes came to our attention back in September when she blew the lid on the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, incurring the wrath of the Western media as she contradicted the story then being peddled, that it was Assad wot did it.

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Bill Van Auken

Marines from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit "inspect"
a house as they search for a Taliban position near the town
of Garmser, Helmand Province. (Source: Marine Times)

A draft agreement reached late Wednesday night between Washington and the puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai calls for as many as 15,000 foreign troops, the vast majority of them American, to continue occupying Afghanistan through 2024 and beyond.

The deal would also leave the Pentagon in control of nine major bases spread across eight provinces. While these bases are to be formally ceded to Afghanistan next year, they would effectively remain in US hands.

They include Bagram Airbase, north of the capital, the largest US facility, Kandahar and Shorab airbase in the south, Shindand Airbase in Herat province near the western border with Iran, the Jalalabad and Gardez airbases near the eastern border with Pakistan, as well as facilities at Kabul International Airport, Herat International Airport and Mazar-i-Sharif Airport in the north near the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

While the ostensible purpose of the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) is to leave behind a “residual” US-led force to train, advise and provide logistical support to the Afghan security forces, as well as conduct counterterrorism operations, the deal would consolidate Washington’s longstanding strategic aim of establishing a permanent military foothold in a strategic region that borders China, Iran and the oil-rich Caspian Basin. This was what the Afghan war—prepared well in advance of the September 11, 2001 attacks—has been about from its onset.

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Joseph Santolan

The death toll in the central Philippines continues to mount in the wake of the devastation caused by Typhoon Haiyan. The current official count of the Philippine government National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) was 4,881 dead as of noon, November 18. This number will continue to increase sharply, as mass casualties in more remote areas begin to be processed.

An estimated 2 million people are homeless, while a total of 11 million are reported to have been affected by the damage. Vast portions of the islands of Samar and Leyte have been laid waste by the storm, and the city of Tacloban is in ruins.

The islands are in the grip of an immense humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands are without access to food, potable water, medicine, or sanitation. Roads throughout the islands remain impassible, and entire communities are completely isolated.

Washington has deployed a massive military force to the region. The nuclear powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington, with 5,000 sailors and 80 aircraft, is in the Leyte Gulf, along with its strike group of two guided-missile cruisers, two guided-missile destroyers, a cargo ship, an oceanographic survey ship and a submarine tender. These are to be joined by 3 amphibious warfare ships and 2 littoral combat ships. Some 850 US troops are on the ground in Leyte and are to be joined by an additional 1,000 US Marines in the next two days.

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Pepe Escobar

Former Saudi ambassador Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud
confers with Israeli strategic affairs analyst Yossi Alpher
at the National Iranian American Council conference in
Washington, Oct. 15, 2013. (NIAC) (CCJN)

The double suicide bombing targeting the Iranian embassy in Beirut - with at least 23 people killed and 170 wounded - was a de facto terror attack happening on 11/19. Numerology-wise, naturally 9/11 comes to mind; and so the case of the Washington-declared war on terror metastasizing - largely conducted by oozy forms of Saudi "intelligence".

Yet don't expect the "West" to condemn this as terror. Look at the headlines; it's all normalized as "blasts" - as if children were playing with firecrackers.

Whether carried out by a hazy al-Qaeda-linked brigade or by Saudi spy chief Bandar bin Sultan's (aka Bandar Bush's) goons, the Beirut terror attack is essentially configured as a major, Saudi-enabled provocation. The larger Saudi agenda in Syria implies getting both Hezbollah and Iran to be pinned down inside Lebanon as well. If that happens, Israel also wins. Once again, here's another graphic illustration of the Likudnik House of Saud in action.

Nuance also applies. Bandar Bush's strategy, coordinated with jihadis, was to virtually beg for Hezbollah to fight inside Syria. When Hezbollah obliged, with only a few hundred fighters, the jihadis scurried away from the battlefield to implement plan B: blowing up innocent women and children in the streets of Lebanon.

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Jordan Shilton

Deportees: Neda Ibrahim and her family in Irbid, Jordan.

In a court ruling on November 8, Norway’s previous coalition government made up of the Labour Party, Socialist Left (SV) and Centre Party was found to have broken the law in its deportation of a family of six in June this year.

The case concerned the Ibrahim family, who had lived in Norway for a decade. The parents are Palestinian refugees and some of their children were born in Norway. Their eldest daughter, Neda, was twelve years old when they were deported and had lived in Norway since she was two, attending school for six years. But their applications for asylum had been repeatedly refused, with authorities questioning the parents’ background and claiming they were Jordanian nationals.

On June 9, the police launched a raid on the family home in the early hours of the morning and forced them to leave. The family were bundled on the next flight to Amman with only those belongings they could carry.

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