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| One year since Mahsa Amini's death |
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Posted by: Lilith7 - 17-09-2023, 03:51 PM - Forum: News and Current Affairs
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One year since Mahsa Amini died in custody in Iran.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-66834156
[b]"The death of Mahsa Amini on 16 September 2022 after being detained by Iran's morality police sparked protests unlike any the country had seen before.[/b]
To mark the one year anniversary of her death, thousands of people all around the world have taken to the streets to demonstrate.
In Iran, Ms Amini's father Amjad was detained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and warned against marking the anniversary of his daughter's death - according to human rights groups including the Kurdish support group Hengaw, and the Norway-based Iran Human Rights. He was later released.
The Iranian state news agency IRNA denied this and later reported that security forces had foiled an attempt to kill Amjad Amini.
Meanwhile, the Kurdistan Human Rights Network has reported that family members of other people killed during the protests sparked by Ms Amini's death, have also been arrested or threatened."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66788392
[b]"A young woman walks down a street in Tehran, her hair uncovered, her jeans ripped, a bit of midriff exposed to the hot Iranian sun. An unmarried couple walk hand in hand. A woman holds her head high when asked by Iran's once-feared morality police to put a hijab on, and tells them: "Screw you!"[/b]
These acts of bold rebellion - described to me by several people in Tehran over the past month - would have been almost unthinkable to Iranians this time last year. But that was before the death in the morality police's custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been accused of not wearing her hijab [veil] properly.
The mass protests that shook Iran after her death subsided after a few months in the face of a brutal crackdown, but the anger that fuelled them has not been extinguished. Women have just had to find new ways to defy the regime.
A Western diplomat in Tehran estimates that across the country, an average of about 20% of women are now breaking the laws of the Islamic Republic by going out on to the streets without the veil.
"Things have changed so much since last year," a 20-year-old music student in Tehran, who we are calling Donya, tells me over an encrypted social media platform. She is one of the many women who now refuse to wear the veil in public. "I still can't believe the things I now have the courage to do. We've become so much bolder and braver.
"Even though I feel scared to my bones whenever I walk past the morality police, I keep my head up and pretend I haven't seen them," she says. "I wear what I like now when I go out." But she quickly adds that the stakes are high, and she is not reckless. "I wouldn't wear shorts. And I always carry a headscarf in my bag in case things get serious."
She tells me that she knows of women who have been raped in custody, and cites reports of a woman sentenced to wash corpses as punishment for not wearing the hijab. All the women I spoke to referenced the [b]surveillance cameras[/b][b] [/b]that monitor the streets to catch and fine those who flout the dress code."
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| National's tax plan |
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Posted by: Lilith7 - 16-09-2023, 05:08 PM - Forum: Opinion and Politics
- Replies (3)
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There must be problems which they're aware of surely, or they'd tell the world in detail what it is they intend to do. Being reluctant to provide details makes them look inexperienced  or deceitful - or possibly both. 
They're really not doing themselves any favours by not providing more details.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/...money.html
"National's tax plan has come under scathing attack from a group of economists who've modelled their foreign buyers' levy and found, at best, they are $450 million a year short of what they need.   
The foreign buyers' tax is a key plank of the National PartyÔÇÖs promise to provide tax cuts. But National is still refusing to accept they have a problem.┬á
"Oh no our tax plan is rock solid," said leader Christopher Luxon. 
But LuxonÔÇÖs refusing to release the "rock-solid" modelling behind his assumption National will pull in $740 million a year from taxing overseas buyers of luxury homes.┬á
"We've looked at our numbers very closely, weÔÇÖve had it independently reviewed," he said.┬á
In the absence of any modelling from National, a group of three economists has done it for them. 
Michael Reddell, a former Reserve Bank analyst and hardly sympathetic to the left, said there's a massive hole.   
"The bottom line was you just get nowhere near their numbers on any plausible assumptions."
Corelogic's Nick Goodall also said it was difficult to see how National's numbers are plausible. 
Along with Sam Warburton, they modelled three scenarios. Remember National needs to raise - on average - $740 million a year.  
The most generous scenario - which assumed a growth in housing stock and sales - found the policy would generate nearly $290 million a year, leaving National about $450 million short. Their most likely scenario was it making $212.7m - that leaves a $527m hole.   
National's based their numbers on 1700 house sales per year. 
The economists' best-case scenario picked it would really be more like 708, 514 of which would be houses priced over $2 million and 194 homes that would otherwise sell for under $2 million but overseas buyers would pay more than market value for.  
National's finance spokesperson Nicola Willis said it was the party's view the economists' modelling is "flawed". 
Asked if he knew his stuff, Reddell said: "Well I spent 30 years at the Reserve Bank, a couple years at Treasury.
So, does Willis know her numbers better than him?  
"I am confident in our numbers, I think the assumptions he has made are flawed," she said. 
Reddell said it appeared National's preferred option was "to bluster and deny and hope the news moves on". 
If National canÔÇÖt find enough money, it leaves them three options: Borrow more, cancel the tax cuts or find some more public service cuts.┬á
Asked what she was going to cut, Willis said: "We are confident we are going to deliver our tax plan in the way that we have set out." 
Robertson said the plan "doesn't add up". 
[b]https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2023/09/election-2023-nicola-willis-heckled-by-grant-robertson-gets-groans-from-audience-over-foreign-buyers-tax-claims.html[/b]
On several occasions throughout the night, the Labour finance spokesperson asked his National counterpart where the detail was in her tax policy document.
The crowd at the ASB Great debate in Queenstown also clearly didn't buy some of Willis' claims, with the audience making a large noise of disapproval when she suggested her party's policy wouldn't lead to house price growth in the region.
  
National is proposing a 15 percent tax on the purchase of properties worth more than $2 million by foreign buyers to help pay for several tax cut initiatives, like shifting income tax brackets to account for inflation.
It was put to her by moderator Jack Tame that the average house price in Queenstown is about $1.7 million, so property owners there looking to sell may increase their asking price above $2 million in order to attract foreign buyers, therefore bringing the region's prices up.
"We don't think it will affect them," Willis replied to groans in audience. "We are going to be asking them to pay a 15 percent tax which will deter speculation the most important thing we can do for housing affordability in Queenstown is get more houses built here."
Treasury advice from 2019 obtained by Newshub shows officials believe foreign activity even in the top-end of the market "displaces New Zealanders from being able to purchase these homes and so places further demand pressures in other segments". 
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| Chile; the mothers of the disappeared |
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Posted by: Lilith7 - 15-09-2023, 04:51 PM - Forum: News and Current Affairs
- Replies (2)
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Finally years after the evil that was Pinoche some families of those taken are managing to find each other, & the govt is starting to search for those murdered.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/world...earch.html
"Thirty-six years after Fernando Ort├¡zÔÇÖs abduction and disappearance, his family finally received his remains: five bone fragments in a box.
Mr. Ortíz, a 50-year-old professor, was kidnapped in 1976 during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, rounded up with other communist leaders in Chile and sent to a torture center so secret that no one knew of its existence for three decades.
No one came out alive from the black site named for the street it was on: Sim├│n Bol├¡var. It was little more than a house in a rural area east of the capital run by the regimeÔÇÖs intelligence agency, DINA. There were no witnesses or survivors to shed light on the detaineesÔÇÖ fates. For decades, there was only deafening silence.
Mr. Ortíz was one of 1,    <!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } -->
Now, before the 50th anniversary of the coup that toppled one of Latin AmericaÔÇÖs most stable democracies and installed the 17-year dictatorship that imprisoned, tortured and killed thousands of its opponents, Chile has enacted a national search plan to track down the remaining disappeared.
ÔÇ£Justice has taken too long,ÔÇØ President Gabriel Boric of Chile said during a ceremony on Wednesday in which he signed a presidential decree to codify the plan. ÔÇ£This is not a favor to the families. It is a duty to society as a whole to deliver the answers the country deserves and needs.ÔÇØ
469 people who disappeared under ChileÔÇÖs military rule from 1973 to 1990. Only 307 of them have been found and identified.
The measure marks the first time since the end of the Pinochet regime that the Chilean government has tried to find those who went missing ÔÇö an effort that until now has largely fallen to the surviving family members, mainly women, who protested, went on hunger strikes and took their cases to court. So far, only through these judicial cases have burial sites been identified."
Stolen at birth
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/s...023-08-29/
[b]SANTIAGO, Aug 29 (Reuters) - A 42-year-old lawyer who was stolen at birth during the rule of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and raised in the United States has traveled thousands of miles to South America to meet his biological mother for the first time.[/b]
"She didn't know about me because they took me at birth and told her I was dead," Jimmy Lippert Thyden said in a TikTok video while on the plane to meet his mother for the first time. "When she asked for my body, they told her they had disposed of it."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/a...d-pinochet
[b]"S[/b]usana BarraÔÇÖs home in a quiet suburb of Santiago, Chile, is only a few miles from the site of the former notorious┬áSim├│n Bol├¡var┬ádeath camp, which was operated by the secret police during the Pinochet dictatorship. Susana was eight years old when her 23-year-old sister, Jenny, was taken there in 1977, never to be seen again.
ÔÇ£No one left alive,ÔÇØ said Susana Barra, who wears a grainy, black and white picture of Jenny pinned to her chest ÔÇô a symbolic gesture adopted by families still searching for relatives who disappeared during the Pinochet
This March, ChileÔÇÖs president, Gabriel Boric, announced the launch of a new plan to find the missing, part of his governmentÔÇÖs electoral pledge to┬áaddress human rights violations┬ácommitted during the dictatorship.
ÔÇ£We have a moral duty to never stop looking,ÔÇØ he said on a visit to a┬ámemorial site[b]┬á[/b]in the north of Chile, where the bodies of 20 victims of PinochetÔÇÖs murderous campaign were unearthed in 1990.
The National Search Plan not only aims to find and identify the forcibly disappeared, but also to bring justice to the families affected by PinochetÔÇÖs atrocities.
ÔÇ£ItÔÇÖs about finding out the circumstances people were detained and how they were forcibly disappeared,ÔÇØ Luis Cordero Vega, justice and human rights minister, said.
[b]Pinochet himself died in 2006, never having faced justice, despite his arrest in London in 1998. He spent a year and half under house arrest ÔÇô during which Margaret Thatcher┬ásent him a gift of Scottish single malt whisky[b]┬áÔÇô [/b]and was eventually freed on ÔÇ£humanitarian groundsÔÇØ. He died with over┬á300 pending charges[b]┬á[/b]against him."
[/b]
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| Hunter Biden Indicted |
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Posted by: king1 - 15-09-2023, 12:29 PM - Forum: News and Current Affairs
- Replies (1)
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oops 
Quote:Hunter Biden was indicted on Thursday on federal firearms charges, the latest and weightiest step yet in a long-running investigation into the US PresidentÔÇÖs son.
Biden is accused of lying about his drug use when he bought a firearm in October 2018, a period when he has acknowledged struggling with addiction to crack cocaine, according to the indictment filed in federal court in Delaware.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/hunter-...EVJ5EPLEU/
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