INTERNATIONAL ROUNDUP
Canadian To Face Deportation From US A Pakistani-born, Canadian citizen, who has spent the past 7 months in a US jail without being charged with a crime, is now facing deportation. Shakir Baloch, a resident of Toronto, was arrested in the post-September 11th sweeps. Eventually, Mr. Baloch was charged with illegally entering the US. His lawyer, Joel Kupferman, claims that, “[Shakir Blaloch] has become the victim of some of the worst racial profiling since the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.” Prior to immigrating to Canada, Mr. Blaloch worked in Pakistan as a doctor providing care to patients who were too poor to afford medical care. ********* Amnesty International Accuses Spanish Police of Torturing Immigrants Amnesty International, a human rights watchdog, has accused police in Spain of abusing, and in some cases torturing, immigrants. The accusation specifies that, “men, women and children have been verbally abused, physically ill-treated, arbitrarily detained and in some cases tortured.” The accusations come in the form of a 100 page report titled, “Spain: Crisis of Identity – Race Related Torture and Ill-Treatment by State Agents”. The report goes on to allege uninvestigated deaths, deportation of unaccompanied children and rapes while in custody. The report can be found online at http://web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/recent/EUR410012002?OpenDocument ********* Illegal Immigrants Settling Near Chernobyl Groups of refugees and other illegal immigrants have found a home near the most infamous nuclear reactor in the world. Activists have discovered that groups of illegal immigrants, mostly fleeing from former Soviet republics, have settled near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, some even within the 1,700 square kilometer containment zone. Stanislau Shuskevich, leader of the Social Democrat party, says, “Some people from troubled areas in the former Soviet Union do not want to put themselves and their children at deadly risk [at home] anymore. So they prefer staying in a radioactive zone to dying from the bullets of some bandits or gunmen or dying in the process of introducing so-called constitutional order at home.” 
|