New York’s latest one-of-a-kind store is ‘like an Indigenous-futurist version of Warhol’s Factory’

Korina Emmerich and Liana Shewey of Relative Arts, the community space, open atelier and shop displaying contemporary Indigenous fashion and design. Photograph: Maria Spann/The Guardian

Indigenous boutique owners Liana Shewey and Korina Emmerich want to acknowledge traditions but also push the design narrative


The New Face of Small Business
Indigenous peoples
Sophia Herring

The Guardian

Tue 30 May 2023 

Location, location, location. It can make or break a business. For Liana Shewey and Korina Emmerich, it was a call to action. When a mutual friend told the activists and creatives – Shewey is an educator and Emmerich is a fashion designer – about a newly vacant storefront on the ground floor of her mother’s Manhattan co-op building, the pair, who met five years ago at an Indigenous women’s collective and quickly became best friends, visited the space. It was 350 sq ft – a far cry from the 20,000 sq ft clubhouse of the duo’s wildest fantasies. But something felt right. “We jumped on it,” said Shewey.


The Sioux Chef’s Owamni restaurant wows critics – and decolonizes cuisine

The co-op board wasn’t willing to hand the keys over to just anyone. But their friend’s mother is Navajo, and also the board president. Within days the building had its newest tenant: Relative Arts NYC, a boutique that carries pieces by Indigenous designers and also hosts literary readings, album releases and art installations featuring work by Indigenous artists.

“It just felt so important for us to have a space, as grassroots organizers in the city,” said Shewey, who was raised in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation. Building a store that specializes in goods from Indigenous and many female-owned labels was a natural way to support their community. According to research from 2021, Indigenous women working full time were typically paid $0.57 for every $1 paid to white, non-Hispanic men. The two had long lamented the scarcity of Indigenous-owned businesses in New York (about .5% of business owners in the US are Indigenous, despite making up approximately 3% of the population).

Liana Shewey and Korina Emmerich. Photograph: Maria Spann/The Guardian

The merchandise builds on their mission to shatter stereotypes. The entrepreneurs speak to “Indigenous futurism”, an emerging art and design movement that leans away from cliches. Shewey recalled meeting a non-Indigenous woman at a poetry reading earlier this year. “She was like, ‘Oh, I’ll need to come by your shop because I need some new silver and turquoise jewelry.’ And that is a beautiful tradition, but we are so much more than that.” Items for sale include blankets from Teton Trade Cloth, a Lenape-owned label, and I Heart Lenape Hoking T-shirts that play off the classic I Heart NY logo.

Emmerich, who grew up in Eugene, Oregon, and whose father is of Puyallup descent, focused on her own fashion label, EMME Studio, in her late 20s and early 30s. Her work has appeared on the cover of InStyle magazine and in the Lexicon of Fashion exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She still makes pieces by special order, and the shop doubles as an atelier. When she spoke with the Guardian, she was rushing to complete a dress that she was making for a producer of Killers of the Flower Moon, the new Martin Scorsese film, to wear to the Cannes film festival. Shewey, whose day job is as an outreach educator at the New-York Historical Society, was speaking from her car, where she was taking a break from a marathon day of teaching four sixth-grade classes.
My struggle is here and I need to be with my communityLiana Shewey

The entrepreneurs, who can be found at their shop every weekend, relied on crowdfunding to convert the space into a store. An initial round of fundraising garnered $6,465, which covered shelving units and a sofa from Craigslist. They found a handful of industrial school chairs on the side of the road.

The pair are breaking even, and still debating whether to form a nonprofit or operate as an LLC. “We want Relative Arts to be a greater incubation hub for people to be able to learn, create and work out of,” said Shewey. For now, though, the merchandise alone speaks volumes. “It’s taking us out of a historical context and saying that we are still here and not just still here, but we are thriving and growing.”
Tell me about what led you both here.

Shewey: I lived in Portland for about a decade and got really integrated into the local rock’n’roll scene. I bartended, worked at a local Starbucks, and then eventually started a music production company of my own with a few friends. In 2014, I moved to the Czech Republic and started organizing around the refugee crisis. I came back in 2016 when everything was happening with Standing Rock. It made me realize my struggle is here and I need to be with my community.


Emmerich: At 13, I made my first jingle dress regalia, and got very into sewing. I came to New York with two suitcases, a cat and $75. I worked in a boutique and I had my own line. I actually had a lot of success, thanks to a company called Brand Assembly that helps support smaller designers. But you slowly realize with everything in the fashion industry, if you want to do it ethically, you will be poor. I just dreamed that one day I would have a space to be able to share everybody’s work.

Korina Emmerich assists a customer at Relative Arts. Photograph: Maria Spann/The Guardian

How do you work as a team?

Emmerich: We’ve been planning and organizing together for so long that we just naturally gravitate towards each other in our work style. Liana is analytical and does the logistical things as well as planning, and organizing when it comes to programming. I have this more creative, community outreach part of my work where building relationships is such an important aspect.
How are you staying afloat?

Emmerich: It’s been a huge challenge. We don’t have any major backing, so we are continuing to look for grants.

How do you choose what goes in the store?

We’re doing contemporary work here and now. There’s no rule that says we have to only exist in a historical contextLiana Shewey

Shewey: Our goal is to showcase contemporary Indigenous designers who are doing fun, subversive, wearable work, as opposed to the assumption of what Indigenous design has to look like. I want to talk about how Indigenous people exist here and now and we’re doing contemporary work here and now. There’s no rule that says we have to only exist in a historical context.

What is it like operating an Indigenous business within a community that so rarely acknowledges it’s on Indigenous land to begin with?


Emmerich: Even though Relative Arts may be the first of its kind, we are not the first ones to be doing this work. It was amazing to have the American Indian Community House come to open the space on our first day, to say a prayer and give us their blessing.

Shewey: I’m thinking about how many people come off the streets and buy one of our pieces just because they like the garments themselves. Then they look at the basketball jersey and ask: what is the Salish Sea? [The Salish coast, along the north-western US and Canada, is home to Indigenous nations.] If they didn’t know, they walk out having learned about decolonization.

Why do you think the fashion world has been so slow to include Native designers?

Emmerich: We’re often sidelined and continue to be marginalized. Magazines will run pieces saying, “Here’s some great Indigenous designers to shop from,” instead of just being a part of the overall narrative.

Shewey: Vogue just covered the Santa Fe Indian Market. It had never been in Vogue before, and it’s like the largest event in Santa Fe.

What advice can you offer for working with a friend?

Shewey: Good ideas are good ideas. But business is totally different. You’re entering what is hopefully a lifelong relationship with somebody. And I think that making that commitment in itself is something that needs to be talked over especially when you’re talking about owner percentages, that in a world where we want everything to be equitable. And it’s important to just really, really consider who is willing to take the initiative to be a business owner, rather than somebody who’s just working in a cool store, because it’s not always going to be sunshine and rainbows.

What is your long-term goal?

Emmerich: We like to think of Relative Arts as a hub. The plans that we have are so much bigger than just a store.

Shewey: I have so many visions of what we are going to build. We’ve mused that we want it to kind of look like an Indigenous-futurist version of Andy Warhol’s Factory. It would be so wonderful to have thousands of feet, although I doubt Andy ever had to apply for funding.

Mexico’s president says he would support peace agreement with cartels

Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s comments come after an activist’s open letter to crime groups to stop forced disappearances

Andrés Manuel López Obrador speaking during a press conference in Mexico City. Photograph: Mexican Presidency/AFP/Getty Images

Oscar Lopez in Mexico City

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 31 May 2023 

Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said he would support an agreement with some of the nation’s most powerful and violent cartels in order to stop the bloodshed that has overwhelmed the country.

The comments from López Obrador, or Amlo as he’s commonly known, came after an activist searching for her missing brother published an open letter directed at 10 organized crime groups calling for them to stop the practice of forced disappearance, where a person isn’t just killed but completely erased, their body dissolve in acid or burnt to ash.


“I agree and I hope we achieve peace – that’s what we all want,” said Amlo during his daily morning news conference when asked about the proposed pact. “Violence is irrational and we’re going to continue looking for peace, to achieve peace and that is what we’re doing. And if there is an initiative of this kind, of course we support it.”


More than 100,000 people have disappeared in Mexico since 1964, the majority in the last 15 years or so since the government at the time launched its war against cartels, sending the military out into the streets and taking down key organized crime leaders.


Land of no return: the Mexican city torn apart by cartel kidnappings

López Obrador, elected in a 2018 landslide, promised a different, non-confrontational approach which he called “hugs not bullets”. He also vowed to take the military off the streets: instead, he has vastly expanded the army’s funding and administrative power, while creating a national guard force with more than 100,000 troops.

But the efforts have done little to staunch the bloodshed: more than 30,000 people have been killed every year of Amlo’s administration, and more than 40,000 have been reported missing since he took office, according to government figures.

“Mexico has been submerged in a spiral of violence that has left a deep mark on society,” wrote activist Delia Quiroa, who has been looking for her brother for nearly a decade, in her letter to gangs including the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels. “Reality has surpassed fiction and the number of missing persons in our country is impossible to count accurately.”

Making an appeal to the commonality between gangsters and victims, marked by traditions like Mother’s Day and Day of the Dead, Quiroa called on the cartels to sign “a social pact to prevent and eradicate the disappearance of people in Mexico and promote peace”.

Quiroa said that the idea for a pact with the cartels emerged from the desperation felt by family members of the disappeared who are fed up with the government’s lack of response to the crisis of missing people.

“It’s a struggle day after day after day,” she told the Guardian. “All we want is to know what happened, if [our relatives] are dead, if we can give them a dignified burial.”

When asked about the possibility of an agreement with the cartels, López Obrador said that he would support anything that would mean curbing Mexico’s ongoing carnage.

“I approve of everything that means putting aside or not using violence,” he said. Cartel members “should assume responsibility and behave like good citizens”.

Quiroa welcomed the president’s support for her pact with organized crime, but said that more needed to be done to help relatives of the missing locate their loved ones – dead or alive.

“What does it matter if the people below [the president], who are in charge of helping victims, don’t care?” she said. “He needs to supervise his people, to make sure they actually do something.”

Angélica Durán-Martínez, a security expert at the University of Massachusetts Lowell said that finding solutions to violence beyond militarization isn’t necessarily outlandish, given that years of all-out war with cartels have only resulted in bloodshed.

“Putting emphasis on how are we going to reduce violence, how are we going to reduce the humanitarian costs and take emphasis away from pursuing crime at all costs,” she said. “It’s an idea that should have a more central place in public policy.”

But without a strategy that takes into account the realities of organized crime in Mexico, the president’s words risk remaining just that.

“Simply declaring it doesn’t mean anything, because the first big problem is how do you do it,” she added. “How do you do it without increasing the power of these organized crime groups?”

Study argues 'girly  (WOMEN'S) economics' data necessary for full picture of economy, equitable policy

Work in the home, largely done by women, not included in economic data

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

LAWRENCE — Any parent can tell you that work doesn’t stop when you leave the office and go home. Yet national and international economic statistics only consider the work that happens “at the market,” or outside the home — not caring for children, cooking, cleaning or caring for elders, tasks largely handled by women, in calculating economic statistics like gross domestic product. A new study from the University of Kansas argues for including such work, or “girly economics,” for a full understanding of work happening in the country to produce better labor statistics and equitable public policy.

Misty Heggeness saw firsthand how data often overlooked work in the home during her time with the U.S. Census Bureau. Now an associate professor of public affairs & administration and associate research scientist with KU’s Institute for Policy & Social Research, she has written a study about how care work at home has been traditionally overlooked, how it leads to incomplete economic statistics and how such numbers are necessary for good public policy. Heggeness presented the paper, titled “The Girly Economics of Care Work: Implications for Economic Statistics,” at the American Economic Association annual meeting in January, and it was published in the association’s Papers and Proceedings.

“Women are and have always been economic agents. If we were to collect information about economic activity in a broader sense, what we would find is women are more active than men,” Heggeness said. “The total amount of paid and unpaid economic activity show for people working full-time jobs, women engage in about one additional hour of economic activity per day.”

The study is linked to a project Heggeness has launched with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Care Board is an effort to gather existing data and statistics on the care economy and make them available in one online location with a dashboard to help researchers, policymakers and others find useful information. The project will generate new statistics on such economic data as well. 

Heggeness cites an Institute for Women’s Policy Research study that found among working adults, women average one extra hour per day on unpaid household chores and care work than men. And while an hour per day may not seem significant, over the course of a year, that adds up to 249 additional hours, or 31 days of additional work by women. The consequences of excluding such data have been in place for decades. Heggeness points out that in 1953, the United Nations standardized a system of measurements to determine gross domestic product. One of the most widely used economic statistics in the world, GDP does not include work done inside the home.

The United States does, however, collect data on care work outside the home. Such data shows that roughly 14% of the U.S. labor force is engaged in teaching, janitorial and cleaning services, and child care. That represents 23.4 million people, more than the state of Florida. But with unpaid care work in the home, such as caring for children or other family members, confusion can reign during times of economic crisis.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the additional stress on parents was widely reported. In addition to their full-time jobs, parents had to ensure kids could take part in online learning from home and saw other domestic tasks increase dramatically as well. The concern was that the additional stress would drive many parents, especially mothers, to leave the labor force. But a lack of reliable statistics on unpaid care work left both journalists and economists scrambling to determine just how much additional work was done and carried implications that women’s work in the formal sector of the economy was less important than men’s, Heggeness said.

“There are components about global and national history, whether intentional or not, that have been driven historically by men and that are determined by a monetized wage or price,” Heggeness said. “If we limit ourselves to that, we are blinding ourselves to the realities women contribute to the economy and keeping it going.”

After pointing out how unpaid care activities — what she calls the underbelly of the economy — are not included in official statistics, Heggeness wrote about the urgency of including such data, as the economy would not function without it. As a result, researchers, statisticians and economists cannot accurately track economic phenomena like a pandemic, growth or recessions without including all economic activity in primary measures. Similarly, it is difficult to measure how overworked or stressed care workers might be, and policymakers cannot develop effective policy to address such problems without a full slate of information, she wrote.

“To not generate statistics with depth and nuance now is an egregious flaw in the profession. We owe it to society and the generations that come after us to use the rich depth of cumulating administrative and real-time data on our economic lives both within and outside of our homes to generate a more complete picture of the modern caregiver and more accurately estimate their economic contributions to society,” Heggeness wrote. “With urgency, we must update national accounting systems and leading economic statistics to capture the modern realities of work, care and the economy and incorporate these statistics into mainstream views of our economy.”

---

JOURNAL

AEA Papers and Proceedings

DOI

10.1257/pandp.20231108 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

The Girly Economics of Care Work: Implications for Economic Statistics

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

30-May-2023

For some US residents, it is now impossible to get home insurance - and all because of the climate crisis

A home in California is destroyed by a wildfire. Photograph: Ethan Swope/AP

The rising incidence of wildfires means many Californians can no longer insure their property. It’s a sign of what’s ahead for the whole housing market

Arwa Mahdawi

THE GUARDIAN
Wed 31 May 2023

Insurance company documents aren’t exactly renowned for being riveting reading. This week, however, State Farm, the largest insurance firm in the US by premium volume, came out with an eyeball-grabbing update: it has stopped accepting new homeowner insurance applications in California.

In a statement, the company said the decision was based on the heightened risk of natural disasters, such as wildfires, along with historic increases in construction costs.

This news didn’t come out of nowhere. Last year, two large insurance firms in California ended their coverage for some multimillion-dollar houses in wildfire-prone areas. “We cannot charge an adequate price for the risk,” one insurance company CEO explained in an earnings call. But the scope of this announcement seems unprecedented. The US’s biggest insurer halting new policies in the US’s most populous state? A state with a population of nearly 40 million suddenly having its home insurance options curtailed because insurance companies know that extreme weather is only getting worse and more expensive? If this doesn’t serve as a wake-up call about the climate crisis, I don’t know what will. Melting ice caps may be abstract enough to ignore, but plummeting house prices have a way of getting people’s attention.

House prices haven’t plummeted yet, of course. Quite the opposite: California is an incredibly expensive place to live. But if you can’t get insurance, it’s almost impossible to get a mortgage. This makes it harder to sell your house and will make prices go down. The writing is on the wall, as insurance companies are well aware.



Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Healing nature will help us all. So why are MEPs fighting a key new restoration law?

Some MEPs claim that a move to more nature-friendly agriculture would negatively impact farmers. Jean-François Monier/AFP/Getty Images

The proposed legislation would require changes to farming methods in Europe to tackle the climate crisis and restore nature, ensuring affordable food for all


Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Janez Potočnik and Paul Polman

THE GUARDIAN
Wed 31 May 2023 

For 10,000 years, human civilisation has grown and thrived because of Earth’s remarkable regenerative capacity that sustains climate stability and rich biological diversity. Now human activity has severely undermined this resilience.

Our patterns of economic growth, development, production and consumption are pushing the planet’s life-support systems beyond their natural boundaries. Last week, members of the European parliament’s agriculture and fisheries committees voted to continue this destruction, rejecting European Commission proposals for a nature restoration law. The vote flies in the face of science, and the claims by some MEPs to be defending farmers and food security are flawed.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, soaring inflation has pushed up food prices. European citizens are worried. Sixty-four per cent of people in 12 European countries, including the UK, say the cost of food is their biggest worry, ahead of concerns about the cost of housing and heating.

Changing farming practices to align food production with efforts to manage the climate crisis and restore nature is the only solution to ensure affordable food for all. Yet certain MEPs are using the war in Ukraine as an excuse to defend post-second world war industrial farming methods and to attack commission plans to make farming more nature-friendly.

These MEPs, mainly from the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), claim that a move to more nature-friendly agriculture would negatively impact farmers and even jeopardise EU climate commitments by making it more difficult to build wind and solar farms. Research by the European Commission shows, however, that the climate crisis and biodiversity loss are “already jeopardising food production” in Europe and that the situation will only get worse.

Hand in hand with another commission proposal to cut the use of pesticides, the nature restoration law would require changes to current farming methods to reduce harm to wildlife, increase water harvesting, prevent soil erosion, enhance pollination and encourage a more diverse production of crops. Even the private sector refers to the law as a key tool and opportunity to take concrete and effective action.

The argument that today’s system of industrial agriculture, fed by fossil fuels and pesticides, will increase food security, secure climate action and offer long-term protection for rural communities is found wanting. At least 10% of Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, with the food sector as a whole responsible for as much as a third of EU emissions. On top of this, degraded soils from overproduction and poor management as well as reducing agricultural yields make the climate emergency worse: rather than absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they release it.
Politicians railing against restoring nature are defending a broken system that must be overhauled for the sake of all

“We can do excellent work in decreasing emissions,” the EU environment commissioner, Virginijus Sinkevičius, told the Guardian recently. “But if ecosystems degrade, if soil degrades, if forests and marine ecosystems degrade, they are not able to absorb carbon or mitigate heat.” Sinkevičius rightly argues that the nature restoration law would “give nature a chance to be the vital force we need for our future and our economies”.

Many in the private sector and the farming community are already working together to implement changes in line with the proposed law that reduce risk and increasingly make good economic sense.

Defending the status quo, as the parliament’s agriculture committee opted to do, will not help farmers. They will be left to cope with unproductive land and the vagaries of climate change-induced extreme weather, affecting their lives and livelihoods.

Farmers in Europe are already suffering from droughts and floods. Spain is turning into an unproductive desert – the Spanish government set aside €2.2bn (£1.9bn) this month to help farmers deal with the country’s ongoing drought. In Emilia-Romagna, one of Italy’s most important agricultural regions, six months’ worth of rain fell within 36 hours in the middle of May. The floods followed a severe drought. Water is poorly absorbed by dry land, and more than 300 landslides were the result.

“Everybody is entitled to have their own opinion, but opinions are not facts,” Frans Timmermans, the commission’s executive vice-president, said when defending the nature restoration law in the European parliament. “Let’s at least agree on the facts.”


MEPs accused of ‘culture war against nature’ by opposing restoration law

The facts are that climate action, nature restoration and food production go hand in hand. Politicians arguing against restoring nature are not fighting to protect consumers from high prices. They are not fighting to protect farmers. They are not fighting to defend climate action. Politicians railing against restoring nature are fighting to defend a broken system that must be overhauled for the sake of us all, farmers included.

It is now up to members of the parliament’s environment committee, and then the parliament as a whole, to show they understand just what is at stake.

Sandrine Dixson-Declève is the co-president of the Club of Rome, Janez Potochnik is the co-chair of the International Resource Panel and a former European commissioner, and Paul Polman is the co-founder and chair emeritus of Imagine and a former CEO of Unilever

MISOGYNY IS FEMICIDE

‘You will be killed’: Iran’s female journalists speak out on brutal crackdown

A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

Ahead of a trial of journalists who covered the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, reporters describe beatings and threats as government agents try to wipe out independent media


Deepa Parent

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 30 May 2023 

It was a chilling warning from government agents. A young female journalist based in Tehran recounted the calls and messages she had received: “It said they were at my sister’s place and were there to rape her.”

These were the same agents from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) who had interrogated her after she had attended one of the nationwide protests that erupted last year after the death in custody of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, who was arrested for wearing her headscarf improperly and then reportedly beaten into a coma.

Ahead of the expected trial this week of two female journalists, who were among the first to report on the death of Amini, reporters in Iran have described the violent beatings, threats and imprisonment they have faced for reporting on protests in the country.


Speaking on condition of anonymity, a female journalist said she feared for her life, despite being released uncharged after being detained by the IRGC for three days. She had been arrested while covering protests as a reporter after Amini’s death.

“They [IRGC agents] have messaged me several times with death threats that they will kill me, like the protesters they killed during the protests,” she said.

The Iranian journalists Niloofar Hamedi, left, and Elaheh Mohammadi are among those detained. They have been accused of orchestrating protests with the CIA. 

Photograph: Abaca Press/Sipa

Another female journalist said she had been told that she had “no right to cover the protests” and could not interview the families of anyone killed.

About 40% of all those journalists detained in the past seven months have been female, according to the press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders.

The two female journalists due to go on trial this week are accused of conspiring with hostile foreign powers, a charge that potentially carries the death penalty. They have been imprisoned and held in solitary confinement since being arrested shortly after their reports appeared in September 2022.
Many citizen journalists have filled the void of official journalists who are trapped by censorship

Niloofar Hamedi, who works for the reformist newspaper Shargh Daily, and Elaheh Mohammadi, who writes on gender equality and social issues for the Hammihan newspaper, were accused of “orchestrating the nationwide protests” through their reporting, as well as being accused of working with western intelligence, especially the CIA.

Journalists in Iran say much of the brutality has been focused on citizen journalists, both male and female, whose reports and photos were seen across Iran and abroad.

Often less well-known, these citizen journalists had “filled the void of official journalists who are trapped by censorship”, a female journalist said. “Out of fear of international reaction, the Iranian government harasses well-known journalists less, but punishes anonymous citizen journalists.


‘They used our hijabs to gag us’: Iran protesters tell of rapes, beatings and torture by police

“I know many of them [citizen journalists] who were beaten in custody, and their legs were broken. All the videos and pictures published during the protests were from these citizen journalists, not official media,” said the journalist.

The dwindling number of jobs for independent journalists – as well as threats to their lives and freedom in Iran – has forced some who spoke to the Guardian to join state-run media outlets to be able to make a living. They still hope for the chance to report freely again.

“The people of Iran are more aware and wiser than ever but, with all the wealth and weapons in the hands of the dictator, how will Iranians fight against this authoritarian regime?” the journalist said. “Sometimes I think of leaving Iran, but who will then help voices to be heard?”

Outrage in India after teenage girl killed in Delhi street

Protesters take part in a candlelight march to campaign for an end to violence against women in New Delhi, India. Photograph: EPA

Body of teenager lay untouched until police informant passed by, raising fresh concerns about women’s safety


Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 31 May 2023 

The killing of a 16-year-old girl in Delhi who was stabbed and bludgeoned to death in an alley as pedestrians walked on has sparked outrage over the safety of women in India.

CCTV footage of the incident shows the teenager was accosted in public by a man, alleged by police to be 20-year-old Sahil Khan, who stabbed her more than 30 times and hit her with a concrete slab.

Several bystanders encountered the incident and though one man attempted to intervene and was violently rebuffed by the attacker, nothing else was done to stop him. No one called the police and after the killing her body lay in the alleyway untouched until it was spotted by a police informant about 30 minutes later.

According to police, Khan had been in a relationship with the girl and had decided to kill her after she tried to end it. He had allegedly used a knife bought two weeks previously, and had followed her from the market to the dark alley, where he attacked her.

“Sahil told us she humiliated him and passed objectionable comments about their relationship. This angered him and he decided to eliminate her,” a police officer told local media.

The attack prompted outrage from activists and politicians who demanded that more be done to protect women in the capital. Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, said on Twitter: “A minor girl is brutally murdered openly in Delhi. This is very sad and unfortunate. The criminals have become fearless, and there is no fear of the police.”


India’s female wrestlers threaten to hand back Olympic medals in harassment row

Swati Maliwal, from the Delhi Commission for Women, said the capital had become “extremely unsafe” for girls and women and that she had “never seen anything more horrifying than this in my career of so many years”.

“There were so many people when the murder took place, but no one helped the girl. Even if they would have shouted, maybe the girl could have survived,” said Maliwal.

The incident once again raised the issue of women’s safety in India, particularly at the hands of their partners. In November, there was similar outrage after a 28-year-old man was accused of chopping up his girlfriend, Shraddha Walker, into 35 pieces and disposing of her in a forest.

National statistics suggest the problem of violence against women is showing no signs of abating in India’s deeply patriarchal society. Delhi is regularly ranked as the most dangerous city for women in India, and between 2020 and 2021, there was a 40% increase in crimes against women, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

LGBTQ RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS
South Korea’s first ever same-sex marriage bill goes to parliament

Marriage equality supporters gather outside the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea, on Wednesday to mark the launch of the country's first same-sex marriage bill. Photograph: Rainbow Action/Marriage Equality Korea

Symbolic bill sponsored by cross-party group of lawmakers is hailed a ‘historic moment’ in fight for marriage equality


Raphael Rashid in Seoul

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 31 May 2023 05.40 BST

Lawmakers in South Korea have proposed the country’s first same-sex marriage bill, in a move hailed by civic groups as a defining moment in the fight for equality.

The marriage equality bill, proposed by Jang Hye-yeong of the minor opposition Justice party and co-sponsored by 12 lawmakers across all the main parties, seeks to amend the country’s civil code to include persons of the same sex in marriage.

The bill is unlikely to pass but forms part of a trio of bills expected to increase pressure on the government to expand the idea of family beyond traditional criteria. The two other bills relate to civil unions and IVF for unmarried women.

South Korea does not recognise civil same-sex partnerships. The constitution stipulates that marriage and family shall be established “on the basis of individual dignity and equality of the sexes”. This provision has usually been regarded as restricting marriage to the union of opposite-sex couples.

“Family is the most basic unit that forms a larger community called society,” Jang said in front of the National Assembly on Wednesday.


South Korean court recognises legal status of same-sex couples for first time

“It’s a historic moment, but this is just the start,” Ryu Min-hee, a lawyer at the Marriage Equality Korea civic group, told the Guardian. “The bills must be discussed by the National Assembly immediately.”

Past efforts to grant legal rights to same-sex couples have been opposed by religious groups that claim such moves would “legalise homosexuality”. The same argument has been used to block anti-discrimination legislation.

Wednesday’s announcement follows a landmark ruling in February that recognised the legal status of same-sex couples for the first time in terms of national health insurance.

As South Korea faces an impending demographic crisis, including a world-record low birthrate, there have been increased calls to redefine the concept of a family.

Moves to broaden the definition to include cohabiting couples or single-member families were reversed under the current administration of President Yoon Suk-yeol.

South Korea’s potential, though unlikely, move towards marriage equality comes at a time when other countries in the region make advances.

Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan have already extended marriage rights to same-sex couples.

In Japan on Tuesday, a court ruled that the ban on same-sex unions was unconstitutional.

Social consensus is often stated by politicians as the reasons for opposing equality laws, including same-sex marriage. According to a Hankook Research survey, 52% of respondents opposed the idea of legislating same-sex marriage in South Korea.

Lawmaker Jang told the Guardian that the responsibility of politicians was to contribute to the process of achieving this consensus.

“Enacting laws is the process of achieving social consensus in a democratic society. I don’t think that these two things are separate or that one comes before the other.”

Japan government under renewed pressure to end same-sex marriage ban

Lawyers and supporters celebrate after ruling at Nagoya district court in central Japan on Tuesday. Photograph: 稲熊成之/AP

Calls grow for marriage equality as another court rules ban is unconstitutional


Justin McCurry in Tokyo

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 30 May 2023 

Pressure is building on Japan’s government to legalise same-sex unions after a court ruled that a ban on them was unconstitutional.

Rights advocates said the ruling on Tuesday by Nagoya district court was a step forward in the campaign to end Japan’s status as the only G7 country not to fully recognise same-sex unions.

It is the second time a court in Japan has ruled the ban unconstitutional, while two other courts have decreed the ban is in line with the postwar constitution, which defines marriage as based on “the mutual consent of both sexes”.

But the Nagoya court, ruling on a lawsuit filed by two men who are in a relationship, rejected the couple’s demand that the state pay each of them 1m yen (£5,715) in compensation for denying them the right to marry.

“This ruling has rescued us from the hurt of last year’s ruling that said there was nothing wrong with the ban, and the hurt of what the government keeps saying,” the couple’s lawyer, Yoko Mizushima, told journalists and supporters outside the court.

Mizushima was referring to a ruling in Osaka last year that the ban was not unconstitutional. A court in Tokyo later reached a similar conclusion but said the lack of legal protection for same-sex families violated their human rights.

While the courts cannot compel the government to act, the latest ruling is expected to reignite the debate over same-sex unions, less than a fortnight after it submitted an LGBTQ+ rights bill designed to avert criticism ahead of the G7 leaders’ summit in Hiroshima.

The government had promised to pass a law to promote “understanding” of LGBTQ+ people before the G7, but opposition from conservatives in the ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP) forced it to submit a watered-down bill the day before the summit began.

The bill initially said “discrimination is unacceptable” but now says that “unfair discrimination” should not be tolerated – wording that campaigners said had rendered the legislation meaningless.

While lifting the ban on same-sex unions is opposed by “family values” conservatives in the LDP, opinion polls show public support for same-sex marriage as high as 70%.

More than 300 municipalities in Japan allow same-sex couples to enter partnership agreements – covering about 65% of the population – but their rights are limited.

Same-sex couples are unable to inherit their partner’s assets – such as the house they may have shared – and have no parental rights to any children their partners may have. Hospital visits are often possible only at the discretion of medical staff.

The prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has provoked anger by claiming that Japan’s ban on same-sex marriage was “not discriminatory” and that legalising it would “fundamentally change society” and challenge so-called traditional family values.

In February, he sacked a senior aide who said he “would not want to live next door” to an LGBTQ+ couple and did “not even want to look at them”.

Agencies contributed reporting

EU accused of ‘staggering neglect’ after just 271 Afghans resettled across bloc

A recently-arrived refugee from Afghanistan waiting for medic support at a temporary camp in Germany in 2021. Photograph: Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images

Many in need of permanent protection remain stuck in ‘prison-like’ camps on Greek islands, leading refugee charity says

Lisa O'Carroll Brussels correspondent
THE GUARDIAN 

Wed 31 May 2023 

Just 271 Afghans were resettled in the EU in 2022, 0.1% of the 270,000 identified as in need of permanent protection, it has emerged.

Leading charity the International Rescue Committee accused EU leaders of “staggering neglect” of Afghan refugees with many remaining trapped in “prison-like” conditions on Greek islands.

In a damning report, the International Rescue Committee claims EU member states have “consistently” failed to deliver on legal resettlement promises leaving many Afghans who do reach the EU borders “vulnerable” all over again.

It claims that not a single person has arrived under a scheme established in Germany in 2021 to resettle up to 1,000 Afghans a month, while Italy has taken just half the refugees it promised.

Between 2021 and 2022, about 41,500 Afghans at risk were admitted to the EU, many through ad hoc emergency evacuations in August 2021. “While the IRC welcomes each of these efforts, this response remains vastly insufficient,” the IRC reports said.

Some countries have not taken any Afghans at all since Kabul fell and the country was taken over by the Taliban, according to its report, Two years on Afghans still lack pathways to safety in the EU.

Many remain “trapped in remote and prison-like conditions” in camps on Greek islands “preventing their inclusion into local communities and devastating their mental health”, said the report.

The authors also found that more than 90% of the Afghans supported by the IRC’s mental health teams in Lesbos and Athens experienced symptoms of anxiety, and 86% of depression, in the year to March 2023,


‘I was told it’s normal’: Afghan refugee who worked for UK sleeping rough in London

David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, said: “This report highlights staggering neglect of Afghans by the member states of the European Union, which puts them at risk at every step of their journeys in search of protection.

“While some states’s well-intentioned plans to bring Afghans to safety have hit repeated delays and obstacles, other countries have failed to make any pledges at all, or to guarantee adequate protection and inclusion for the tiny proportion of Afghan refugees who manage to reach Europe.”

He said the welcome EU member states showed to more than 8 million people fleeing Ukraine showed its capacity to deliver.

“There is simply no excuse for treating Afghans, and refugees forced from their homes elsewhere, any differently,” Miliband added.

The IRC report focuses on the lack of safe pathways for refugees but does not appear to reflect the wider efforts made in countries like Germany to support Afghans.

In March the German Office of National Statistics, Destatis, announced that 286,000 Afghan nationals arrived and were registered in the country in 2022.

However, it has faced local criticism that it has acted too slow on its promises.

One refugee interviewed for the IRC report said she had “high hopes” for resettlement in Germany but the process, which was successful, took two and a half years.

“Waiting for an answer was a very difficult and anxious time for me, as I was without my two children in this foreign country whose culture I did not know. I had no choice but to wait and hope that one day I would be able to offer my children a safe life here,” Zahra, 60, said.

The IRC called on EU member states to “scale up protection pathways” and aim to resettle 42,500 Afghan refugees over the coming five years “at a minimum”.

The IRC suggests the UK, which is under constant criticism for failing to deliver on resettlement schemes, is doing better than many EU states.

British government data updated last week showed indefinite leave to remain has been given to just under 13,000 Afghans under two UK resettlement and relocation programmes.

Interview

‘I’ve never seen so much vitriol’: activist Paul Boden on America’s homelessness crisis

‘The old system wasn’t perfect by any means. But when it existed, you didn’t have millions of people living out in your streets.’ Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Leading voice demanding rights for the unhoused discusses the history of homelessness and where the US can go from here

Erin McCormick in San Francisco

THE GUARDIAN
Mon 29 May 2023

 11.00 BST

Back in 1983, when a recession and horrible rainstorms thrust homelessness in the political spotlight in San Francisco, Paul Boden was already familiar with life on the streets.

Then 23, he had been squatting, couch-surfing and staying at hostels since he was 16. When he saw people lining up to get spots in San Francisco’s first temporary emergency shelters, Boden volunteered to help out.


‘Stick over carrot’: progressive Portland takes a hard turn on homelessness

Women were sleeping on the cafeteria floors of St Anthony’s food kitchen while men, with their sleeping bags and clothes in tow, were crashing in the chairs and on the rug at nearby Hospitality House.

Four decades later, Boden is still a leading voice in demanding rights for the unhoused.


He served as the director of San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness, a non-profit organization fighting to empower those without homes, for 16 years, and now serves as the executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (Wrap), which works to eliminate the root causes of homelessness and demand protection of human rights.

Along the way, he and his colleagues have been documenting the path that led to the devastating problem of homelessness that the US faces today.

There were 582,500 people counted as being homeless in the national one-night head count in January 2022, which Boden says counts only the most obvious cases of homelessness and misses many others. Across the US, only 33 affordable homes are available for every 100 extremely low-income renter households.

The Guardian spoke with Boden about the history of homelessness in the US and what he sees as meaningful solutions. The conversation is edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start at the beginning. You’ve argued that the homelessness emergency the US is facing today is rooted in actions that began in the 1980s. How did it all begin?

It was massive cuts to federal affordable housing programs, part of the Reagan revolution. By 1983, affordable housing funding had basically bottomed out.

Wrap just finished research that shows that there are 438,289 fewer units of public housing available today than there were in 1994. Betty Crocker couldn’t give you a better recipe for how to end up in a situation where people are living out in your streets.

What did public housing look like before the 1980s and what happened to change the direction?

The federal department that we now call Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was created in 1937 in response to massive homelessness (following the Great Depression). The enabling legislation said the government has the responsibility to ensure that all of its citizens have a clean, safe, decent place to live that they can afford.

But in 1998, the legislation was changed to say the federal government cannot be held accountable to ensure that even a majority of its citizens have a place to live. The federal government said: “Oh, no, no, we’re not responsible. We’ve relieved ourselves of this responsibility.”

In 1994 and 95, the Hope VI program under Bill Clinton that aimed to rebuild public housing tore down a lot of public housing and made it mixed-income.

California senator and former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation that overturned the law that said that if the government destroys a unit of federal housing, it is legally required to replace that unit.

Then, in the late 90s came welfare reform, imposing all kinds of caps and limits [on aid to poor families]. Three hundred thousand people were cut off from social security benefits in a single day because they were labeled as “dual diagnosed” (having mental illness coupled with drug dependency). And you could no longer get social security if part of your disability was a drug addiction.

So it was the dismantling of all these different systems: your housing system, your welfare system, your disability systems. At the time we were also wiping out halfway houses and lodges for mentally ill people. Then you wonder why all of these different folks, whose main thing in common is living in poverty, ended up out on your streets.

Weren’t there a lot of problems with public housing basically ghettoizing people of color?

Oh yes, there were all kinds of problems, including redlining. Don’t by any stretch of the imagination think that I’m saying everything was so perfect back in the day. But the current approach is not fixing it.

What has our response been these last 40 years?

In the 1980s, the Federal Emergency Management Agency started funding emergency shelters. These were supposed to be temporary facilities at the time of a crisis. The mantra at the time was basically: we’re in a recession and times are tough for everybody, so people are homeless, but as soon as the recession is over, they’re all gonna go back home. The reality was, there were no homes for them to go back to.

We’ve never gone back to a safety-net program structure or a housing program structure. Today we have program after program, sweep after sweep, security ambassadors, business improvement districts, all of these efforts to mitigate the presence of homelessness without doing a damn thing about what caused the advent of contemporary homelessness in the early 1980s.

Political leaders would say: we have to do something right away. Well, now it’s 40 years later, and the San Francisco board of supervisors just passed a resolution to open up 2,000 more shelter beds.

The old system wasn’t perfect by any means. But when it existed, you didn’t have millions of people living out in your streets.

Instead, they chose the cheapest way that they could show a pretense of caring at all about the human beings that are living out in the street.

But we are still funding subsidized housing, right?

Yes, there are low-income housing vouchers that are privatizing accommodation of affordable housing, so that a private landlord can make a profit off of it. That basically means you have an incredibly poor person who’s homeless and you’re sending them out into the open market to find private landlords that will accept a HUD voucher, and all the bureaucracy that comes with it. If you’ve got a disability, if you’re a person of color, well then good luck! You think racism and classism don’t exist in America anymore, just because someone has a voucher?

What are the current trends you’re seeing in working with the unhoused population?

In the 40 years I’ve been doing this in 13 cities that we work in, I have never seen so much vitriol coming from neighborhood associations, business groups, civic groups and tech groups, saying these people need to go. Those groups are saying: “We’ve been looking at this homelessness for 40 years, and we’re sick of it. We don’t want to see it any more.”


Will America’s first ‘right to sleep outside’ actually help unhoused people?

We’ve had non-profits telling us that they’re gonna fix it. We’ve had people running for mayor saying they’re gonna make it disappear. And we have a federal government that says you can’t hold us accountable for the fact that it homelessness even exists any more.

People seem to be saying: “if I don’t see poor people, then I don’t have to worry that there’s too much poverty in America. If I don’t see homeless people, I don’t have to worry that we have a homeless problem. Because if I don’t see it, it’s not a problem.”

How have the numbers of unhoused people changed?

The number of people who are homeless has gone up, yes. But the real change is that the longevity of homelessness and the difficulty of getting through the system is off the hook.

In the early 80s, when senior citizens would come to me, it might take me two weeks to find them a place to live. Now it’s next to impossible. It might take five years. Now you have to be finger imaged to get into the shelter system. You have to call a hotline number and get on a waiting list that has 1,400 names on it.

And then local officials turn around and argue that the homeless people are “service resistant”.

It’s unconscionable. After 40 years, it’s so hard to get our leaders to even admit that what they’ve been doing is never gonna work.

It seems like the government, at least in San Francisco and Los Angeles, has been spending a lot of money building new housing or converting hotels to housing for the homeless. If we are creating all this housing, what’s going wrong?

First, taking a single-room occupancy hotel off the open market and converting it to a homeless program is not creating anything. It’s changing who’s able to live in the hotel. And it’s changing the management of the hotel. They rob Peter to pay Paul. But it’s a lot cheaper than actually building housing.

And mostly, when you hear about new affordable housing that’s being built, if you look at the affordability requirements to live there … it can be people with incomes of like $90,000.

What would you propose as a good way to actually provide deeply subsidized housing?

I would go back to the original legislation from 1937. And I would say the federal government needs to be held accountable to find affordable housing for the poorest people in this country. No waiting list, no intakes. We don’t care where you were born. We don’t care if you’ve ever gone to jail. We don’t care who lives in your house – you’re eligible! You’ve just gotta fund it.


‘What do we need to feel safe?’ Lives affected by homelessness – in pictures

The idea is to create units that are mixed income that are spread across the city that are habitable and that poor people can afford to live in.

That’s a tall order!

Yeah, it’s a tall order. It’s a restructuring of a society that has gone so far off-kilter. That the idea that people even merit a decent place to live regardless of their income is more foreign to us now than it was in 1937.

It’s like, you’re still trying to rearrange the chairs on the deck of the Titanic and you hit the iceberg 40 years ago.