Detainee deaths

The human rights group The Edmund Rice Centre, is reporting that at least nine asylum seekers who were sent back to Afghanistan by the Australian government have been killed on their return. In addition, three children of asylum seekers who were sent back to Afghanistan from Nauru have also been killed.

At least two of the asylum seekers were murdered by the local militia (a polite word for "armed mob with automatic weapons and pretentions of being in the army"), while some of the others were killed when their houses were bombed.

Of course the government ministers who rejected claims that the asylum seekers' lives would be in danger if they were sent back, are putting on a brave face, arguing that they had no way of knowing that the people's lives were in danger if they went back to Afghanistan.

Gosh. We send people back into a country where armed militias are settling old scores and murdering those who are insufficiently religious, where terrorists set off bombs deliberately targetting civilians, where terrorists in uniforms occupying military forces fire missiles at houses, and they get killed. Even Blind Freddie could have seen that coming.

Jewish family flees persecution

Not in Iran, or Iraq, or even Russia.

In Freedonia.

A large Delaware school district promoted Christianity so aggressively that a Jewish family felt it necessary to move to Wilmington, two hours away, because they feared retaliation for filing a lawsuit. The religion (if any) of a second family in the lawsuit is not known, because they're suing as Jane and John Doe; they also fear retaliation. Both families are asking relief from "state-sponsored religion."

The behavior of the Indian River School District board suggests the families' fears are hardly groundless.
[...]
A former board member suggested that Mona Dobrich might "disappear" like Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the atheist whose Supreme Court case resulted in ending organized school prayer. O'Hair disappeared in 1995 and her dismembered body was found six years later.

The crowd booed an ACLU speaker and told her to "go back up north."

In the days after the meeting the community poured venom on the Dobriches. Callers to the local radio station said the family they should convert or leave the area. Someone called them and said the Ku Klux Klan was nearby.

Story here.