4, February 2017
US judge blocks Trump’s travel ban 2
A US federal judge in Seattle, Washington, has ordered a temporary, nationwide halt to President Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban that blocks the entry of citizens from seven predominately Muslim countries. The ruling on Friday by US District Judge James Robart was broader than similar ones before it, and represents the most severe legal blow to Trump’s action, although his administration could still have the policy put back into effect with an appeal.
The ruling prompted government authorities to immediately communicate with airlines and begin taking steps that would allow those previously affected to travel. Trump signed an executive order on January 27 that imposed a temporary travel ban on citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and placed an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees. The move also suspended admission of all refugees for 120 days.
Robart’s decision came after Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a lawsuit to invalidate key provisions of Trump’s executive order.
The judge questioned the Trump administration’s use of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the US as a justification for the travel ban. He said no attacks had been carried out on American soil by individuals from the seven countries affected by the ban.
For Trump’s order to be constitutional, Robart said, it had to be “based in fact, as opposed to fiction.” The judge’s ruling was welcomed by groups protesting the immigration order.
Presstv
4, February 2017
Leading German News Magazine portrays Donald Trump as a terrorist 0
A leading German weekly magazine has published a striking cartoon of US President Donald Trump on its cover, portraying him as a terrorist, who beheaded the Statue of Liberty while shouting “America First.”
On the cover of its Friday edition, Der Spiegel depicted the cartoon figure of Trump with a bloodied knife in one hand and the bleeding head of Lady Liberty in the other.
Edel Rodriguez, who designed the cover, told The Washington Post that the Statue of Liberty represents the United States’ history of welcoming refugees.
Rodriguez, a Cuban refugee, who went to America as a political refugee in 1980, condemned Trump’s order to ban entry of refugees to the US, seeing it as “a beheading of democracy, a beheading of a sacred symbol.”
He argued that beheading is associated with the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group and “there’s a comparison” between ISIL and Trump. “Both sides are extremists, so I’m just making a comparison between them.”
“I was 9 years old when I came here, so I remember it well, and I remember the feelings and how little kids feel when they are leaving their country,” Rodriguez told the Post. “I remember all that, and so it bothers me a lot that little children are being kept from coming to this country.”
When asked why he pictured Trump with missing facial features, Rodriguez said, “That’s the way I see him. I see him as someone that’s very angry, and it’s pretty much his mouth that’s moving all the time, so that’s how I tend to show him in some of my work.”
Trump signed an executive order last week—after only a week in office— to bar all persons from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia from entering the United States for 90 days and suspends the US Refugee Admissions Program for 120 days until the president determines they have been sufficiently changed.
This is not the first time that the president was pictured beheading the statue. Back in December 2015, after Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” The New York Daily News pictured him beheading the Statue.
The New Yorker magazine also revealed on Friday a new cover illustration—called “Liberty’s Flameout”— showing the Statue’s flame has been extinguished.
“It used to be that the Statue of Liberty, and her shining torch, was the vision that welcomed new immigrants. And, at the same time, it was the symbol of American values,” said John Tomac, who designed the cover.
“Now it seems that we are turning off the light,” he told the magazine, which announced on Friday that it was canceling its annual party for the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.
Presstv