The UK government plans to banish people to an island where “nothing makes sense”…

Ascension island today is known among botanists as an island taken over by invasive species and among space buffs as a former, possible landing place for the space shuttle. As the BBC reports, nobody lives there permanently. The island burst into the news this week as the UK government announced it was considering an Australia-style immigrant prison on the island. Outrage ensued, but unfortunately, as long as Australia’s “deterrence system” of immigrant prisons appears to be successful, other wealthy countries will see torturing immigrants as a way to deter immigration. …

Media executives were charged with incitement in Rwanda and Nuremberg — what about today?

Following the conclusion by the International Court of Justice that Myanmar is committing genocide, the International Criminal Court continues to collect evidence for trial. The ICC is looking at generals and other high-level persons in the Myanmar government. Yet genocides are not created only by soldiers and politicians. The media plays a critical role in disseminating genocidal content and indoctrinating communities in genocidal thinking. Charges were brought against both the creators and those responsible for the dissemination of genocidal content at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Nuremberg trials. …

Update: A Federal Judge has now blocked the order: https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20441250-sdny-icc-eo-preliminary-injunction

This week, the Trump Administration announced sanctions against the top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda, and the head of one of the Court’s divisions, Phakiso Mochochoko. The sanctions block their financial assets and prohibiting US citizens from “having any dealings with them.”

Such sanctions are normally used for criminals and terrorists. Using them against a court is the international relations equivalent of a horse head in a bed. …

Some Things Are a Matter of Debate…But Others Are Made-Up Nonsense. Can the media tell the difference?

For years now, some conservative think tanks have hired armies of so-called “legal experts” to create fog around the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. The point of this fog is not to educate the public on constitutional law, or clear up mistakes in constitutional interpretation, but to cast doubt on the legitimacy of citizenship for millions of Americans. The media can choose to participate in these efforts, or it can just stop.

The 14th Amendment says that:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. …

The Right to Enter Your Country is a Founding Principle of Citizenship

For something so important to the lives of so many, there is a remarkable level of disagreement about what citizenship is. Is it a status? A package of rights and duties? The International Court of Justice says its “a social fact of attachment, a genuine connection…,” whatever that means. Philosophers and lawyers have been arguing about what citizenship forever, but for the rest of us, citizenship means belonging to a community, a passport so we can come and go and, for many, voting. A lot of experts do agree on one thing. No matter what citizenship is, being a citizen means that you have the right to enter and reside in your country of citizenship. …

Since the 1960s, scientists and other experts have been in a panic about global population growth. Fueled in part by racist pseudo-research and anti-immigrant think tanks, the concerns about “population explosions” have cycled in and out of the news each time the world’s population adds another billion people. Is population growth a problem? Surely, it’s bad for the environment, conservation and climate change. Climate change is such an emergency, some people are limiting the number of children they have.

But we may never know for sure, because new research shows that the global population may be about to peak and will then begin to decline. The reason? As a recent study in the Lancet put it, “continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception.” …

In the world of TV, we hold these truths to be self-evident:

1. That every young, blond woman is either a hot, crazy waif who can’t take care of herself or a witch.
2. That the main character must be white, no matter how unlikely or ridiculous this makes the plot.
3. That dark-skinned guards must be sadistic monsters.
4. That mental illness is either risible or signs of a sparkly, interesting personality.
5. That all the main characters must be smoking hot. Because only hot people matter.
6. That actors of totally different ethnic backgrounds who come from completely different countries are totally interchangeable as long as you get the skin color right. …

Today, the Democrats released a substantial report on global migration. This report gives some clues to how they might fix migration if they were in charge. As someone who works on statelessness, I was interested to see what the Democrats would say about the connection between statelessness and displacement. The answer: not a lot.

If you read the report, statelessness is mostly regulated to one of those break-out, shaded boxes where report writers put information they don’t want to leave out, but don’t quite know what else to do with. …