Here’s Everything New on Netflix in November 2023

As dreary November rolls in, Netflix has a smorgasbord of offerings for the cornucopia. On Nov. 22, High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America returns with its second season to explore how African American food has shaped the nation. On Nov. 16, Part 1 of the sixth and final season of The Crown will offer up enough drama to mirror dysfunctional family gatherings around the approaching holiday season. And Rustin, streaming Nov. 17, tells the story of the titular, overlooked Civil Rights leader, making for a good Thanksgiving watch.

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Here’s everything coming to Netflix in November 2023—and what’s leaving.

Here are the Netflix originals coming in November 2023

Available November 1

Hurricane Season

Locked In

Mysteries of Faith

Nuovo Olimpo

Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering vs. Haysom

Wingwomen

Available November 2

All the Light We Cannot See

Cigarette Girl

Higuita: The Way of the Scorpion

Onimusha

Unicorn Academy

Available November 3

BLUE EYE SAMURAI

Daily Dose of Sunshine

Ferry: The Series

NYAD

Selling Sunset: Season 7

Sly

The Tailor: Season 3

Vacaciones de verano

Available November 7

The Improv: 60 and Still Standing

Available November 8

The Billionaire, the Butler and the Boyfriend

The Claus Family 3

Cyberbunker: The Criminal Underworld

Escaping Twin Flames

Robbie Williams

Available November 9

Akuma Kun

Temple of Film: 100 Years of the Egyptian Theatre

Available November 10

At the Moment

The Killer

Available November 14

Criminal Code

How to Become a Mob Boss

The Netflix Cup: Swing to Survive

Suburræterna

Available November 15

Feedback

Matt Rife: Natural Selection

Available November 16

Best. Christmas. Ever!

The Crown: Season 6 Part 1

In Love and Deep Water

Available November 17

All-Time High

Believer 2

CoComelon Lane

The Dads

The Queenstown Kings

Rustin

Sagrada Familia: Season 2

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

Stamped from the Beginning

Available November 21

Leo

Available November 22

Crime Diaries: The Celebrity Stylist

High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America: Season 2

Squid Game: The Challenge

Available November 23

My Daemon

My Little Pony: Make Your Mark: Chapter 6

Available November 24

A Nearly Normal Family

DOI BOY

I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me

Last Call for Istanbul

My Demon

Wedding Games

Available November 27

Go Dog Go: Season 4

Available November 28

Comedy Royale

Love Like a K-Drama

Onmyoji

Verified Stand-Up

Available November 29

American Symphony

Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife

Available November 30

The Bad Guys: A Very Bad Holiday

Family Switch

Hard Days

Obliterated

Virgin River: Season 5 Part 2

Here are the TV shows and movies coming to Netflix in November 2023

Available November 1

13 Going on 30

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

60 Days In: Season 5

The Addams Family

The Big Lebowski

The Change-Up

Desperado

Downsizing

Drag Me to Hell

Love in the Wild: Season 1

Madea’s Family Reunion

The Mummy (2017)

Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2

Pitch Perfect

The Scorpion King

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Sherlock Gnomes

Six Feet Under: Seasons 1-5

Sixteen Candles

The Social Network

Ted 2

Victorious: Season 3

Whiplash

Available November 3

Erin & Aaron: Season 1

Available November 4

The Amazing Race: Season 17

The Amazing Race: Season 31

Insidious: The Red Door

Lopez vs. Lopez: Season 1

Available November 7

Face Off: Seasons 4-5

Available November 10

Team Ninja Warrior: Season 2

Available November 11

Laguna Beach: Season 3

Available November 15

First Wives Club: Seasons 1-3

Million Dollar Decorators: Season 1

Available November 16

Downton Abbey

Harriet

Lone Survivor

Available November 20

Shahs of Sunset: Seasons 1-2

Available November 23

Love Island USA: Season 3

Available November 30

School Spirits: Season 1

Here’s what’s leaving Netflix in November 2023

Leaving November 3

The Amazing Race: Season 5

The Amazing Race: Season 7

Leaving November 6

Jerry Seinfeld: Comedian

Leaving November 10

Laguna Beach: Seasons 1-2

Leaving November 15

Accepted

Jeff Dunham: All Over the Map

Loving

Leaving November 22

Hard Kill

Love Island USA: Season 1

Leaving November 29

Disappearance at Clifton Hill

Leaving November 30

About Last Night

Arrival

Basketball Wives: Seasons 1-2

Dear John

Fences

Hook

LEGO: Friends: Seasons 1-4

New in Town

Peppermint

Stuart Little

Stuart Little 2

Superbad

Surf’s Up

The Punisher

Up in the Air

source https://time.com/6330428/new-on-netflix-november-2023/

In Multiple Courts, Trump’s Mouth Catches Up With Him and His Allies

For many politicians, exaggerating or lying in public speeches and on TV often draws few consequences, even when it’s called out. But it’s different in the judicial system. Misleading and mouthing off in court can bring on fines and the risk of a jail sentence.

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That’s what Trump and his orbit are coming up against as multiple court cases move forward, with the former President fighting charges that he illegally tried to overturn election results in Georgia, fomented a violent attempt to block the certification of the election on Jan. 6, refused to return sensitive government secrets, fraudulently covered up hush money payments, and fudged the value of his properties to get better loan terms.

The proceedings are playing out in courtrooms in New York, Washington, D.C., Georgia and Florida. And it’s not going well for Trump. Here’s an overview of key developments in Trump’s cases.

The judge in the New York civil fraud trial found Trump not credible

The judge presiding over Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York said last week he didn’t find Trump credible when he was briefly asked questions on the stand. That doesn’t bode well for Trump as prosecutors are expected to call on him next week to answer questions about how he valued his properties for insurance companies and banks. The judge has already fined Trump for disparaging court officials and will soon render a verdict on whether Trump should pay the state of New York $250 million in fines for fraud.

Justice Arthur F. Engoron unexpectedly called Trump to the stand on Oct. 25 to answer whether he had disparaged a law clerk in comments to reporters outside the courtroom earlier that day.  Why did that matter? Judges can restrict what defendants can say publicly about court staff in an effort to protect courtroom workers from threats, intimidation, and undue influence. Trump was already under court-ordered restrictions on making additional public comments about staff on duty in the courtroom, and the judge had  previously fined Trump $5,000 for not deleting disparaging comments about a law clerk from his campaign website. 

With Trump on the stand last week, the judge wanted to know if he was referring to the same law clerk when he told reporters the person sitting next to Engoron was “very partisan.” Trump denied it and said he was speaking about his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who that day had been on the witness stand, on the other side of the judge.  After deliberating for a few minutes, Engoron reportedly said, “I find that the witness is not credible,” and fined Trump $10,000 for the additional violation of the court’s gag order.

Trump is accused of fraudulently giving banks and insurance companies inflated values of his properties. New York’s attorney general Letitia James brought the case against Trump and his two adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric. Trump’s legal team has said that Trump didn’t commit fraud and that the financial transactions were profitable for the institutions involved.

Justice Engoron has already ruled that Trump is liable for fraud and the trial will determine what financial fines or other punishments Trump will face. Engoron also canceled the business licenses Trump uses to operate in the state, but an appeals court allowed the licenses to stay in place for now. 

Over the next several days, Donald Jr. and Eric are slated to take the stand in the trial, in addition to Trump himself on Nov. 6, and Trump’s daughter Ivanka later that week.

Prosecutors could finish bringing witnesses as soon as next week, and then Trump’s legal team will have an opportunity to bring a slate of witnesses to the stand. The trial is expected to be wrapped up by the end of the year.

Trump’s under a gag order in the Jan. 6 case

Trump’s also under a gag order in federal court in Washington, D.C. where he’s going to trial on charges brought by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith for his actions to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win and encourage the violent interruption of the certification of the results in the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021.

After weeks of deliberations, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan ruled on Sunday that Trump cannot make public statements targeting individuals involved in the case. The judge found that when Trump has publicly singled out people in the past, that has led to them being threatened and harassed.

Trump’s legal team had argued that the order restricting Trump’s public comments about the case was vague and violated Trump’s free speech rights. Chutkan disagreed, saying the gag order was necessary for the “orderly administration” of the case.

The judge said the court’s gag order is narrowly tailored to block comments about the people involved in the case and doesn’t limit Trump’s political speech. Chutkan went on to give examples of what kinds of statements Trump is allowed to make, saying that Trump is allowed to say he is innocent, say the prosecution is politically motivated and that the Biden administration is corrupt. Chutkan cited a Truth Social post Trump wrote on Oct. 20 in which Trump wrote, “Does anyone notice that the Election Rigging Biden Administration never goes after the Riggers, but only after those that want to catch and expose the Rigging Dogs.” That would still be allowed under her gag order, Chutkan said.

By contrast, a Truth Social post Trump wrote on Oct. 24 that singled out a potential witness, Mark Meadows, and said that people who make a deal with prosecutors are “weaklings and cowards,” is not allowed under the court’s gag order, Chutkan wrote. That post, Chutkan ruled, could be seen as an effort to intimidate Meadows or prevent him from working with prosecutors.

Trump will have to show he’s complying with the order for several months. That trial in federal court in Washington, D.C. is set to start on March 4.

Trump’s former lawyers admit to breaking the law in Georgia

The fact that members of Trump’s legal team spread lies and took steps to illegally reverse the 2020 election is now a matter of public record, leading to real consequences for the former Trump allies. In Georgia, three of Trump’s former attorneys who worked on his effort to overturn Biden’s win there took plea deals from prosecutors in the past few weeks. 

Facing the prospect of harsher penalties, Sydney Powell pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge that she illegally accessed voting equipment. Kenneth Chesebro took a felony charge for actions that brought together fake electors in the state. And Jenna Ellis pleaded to a felony for aiding and abetting false statements and writings.

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“I believe in, and I value election integrity,” Ellis wrote in an apology to the people of Georgia that she read from in court on Oct. 24. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” Ellis wrote.

The Georgia case, brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, accuses Trump and 18 others of launching a conspiracy to overturn Trump’s election loss to Biden in the state. In addition to Trump’s three former lawyers, bail bondsman Scott Graham Hall pleaded guilty in September to five misdemeanors related to illegally accessing voting equipment and data and agreed to testify in future cases. 

The plea deals put pressure on other high-profile defendants in the case, including Rudy Giuliani, who was Trump’s most prominent lawyer spreading false claims that Trump won, and John Eastman, who worked in multiple states to marshal fake Trump electors to overturn Biden’s win.

The deals also make it more likely that Trump’s former lawyers will provide information to prosecutors about Trump’s role in trying to reverse his loss in Georgia, including what led up to Trump’s taped phone call with Georgia’s top election official, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find” votes to help him win.

A Colorado court will decide if Trump stays on the ballot

Trump’s actions and statements after the 2020 election are also being examined in a Colorado court where a group of voters are trying to kick Trump off the 2024 ballot in the state, citing a Constitutional amendment that disqualifies officials who have engaged in insurrection from holding future office.

The trial in the lawsuit began this week in Denver. The judge in the case, Sarah B. Wallace, will decide whether to remove Trump’s name from GOP primary ballots before they are printed in January in advance of Colorado’s March 5 Republican primary.

Lawyers arguing for Trump to be removed from the ballot reportedly said in court Monday that Trump’s statements had encouraged the crowd that violently broke into the Capitol Building to stop the certification of election results. Trump’s legal team has said Trump had been using his free speech rights to question the integrity of the election results.

Similar cases trying to bar Trump from ballots for supporting an insurrection are being heard in the Minnesota Supreme Court and Michigan state court.

source https://time.com/6330449/donald-trump-trial-testify-gag-order/

The Israel-Hamas War Is Making Americans Question Their Relationships

After Hamas killed around 1,400 people and took at least 200 hostage on Oct. 7, Marina, who spent much of her childhood in Israel but now lives in the U.S., heard from friends and family all over the world, expressing sorrow and concern for her relatives. But even as she posted videos and photos on social media, where she is not usually active, she did not hear from one of her dearest friends, with whom she usually communicated daily. The women had met through their husbands, who were best friends. They’d gone to each other’s weddings and taken holidays together. They had children roughly the same age and a decade of great memories. When Marina lost a family member, both members of the couple empathized in a way even some relatives did not. 

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Her friend is from a majority Muslim country, but that seemed to make the relationship richer. “These are educated, kind, beautiful people that we were so proud to be friends with,” says Marina. “This is why we’re in America because we are friends with everybody, every culture.” And yet for four days, she says, there was silence. (TIME is identifying several people in this story, including Marina, by first name only so they can speak freely about friends and family.)

Read More: How the Activist Left Turned on Israel

Eventually, the friend sent her a brief note saying that she was hurt by Marina’s posts, that they suggested all Muslims were terrorists. Marina was flabbergasted. “Nothing [I’m posting] is about Muslims and nothing is about the Arab culture,” she says. “I only talked about Hamas.” Things deteriorated from there. As Marina tells it, her friend said that she could not support the Israeli government’s actions, and Marina said this was not about politics–babies had been killed and her relatives’ lives were in danger. Eventually, her friend posted a story on her social media that Marina felt minimized the terror wrought by Hamas. “I just had a breakdown at work. I started crying,” says Marina. “This is a girl who I think is the most amazing, wonderful, has such social intelligence, emotional intelligence, and for her to put something that evil—it broke me, it completely destroyed me.” 

In the U.S., far from the frontlines of the war that has shaken the world in recent weeks, people are discovering an uncomfortable truth about friends and family members they thought they knew well: they feel very differently about the situation in Israel and Gaza. Having weathered the ruptures and family strife caused by differences of opinion over the Trump Administration, mask and vaccine mandates, and debates over gender, race, and the environment, relationships are being strained by a new 1,000-year-old sticking point: who’s the bad guy in the Middle East? 

To many, this dispute is more alarming than the political brawls that came before, because the people who are now arguing with them were supposed to be allies. “It feels more incomprehensible than disagreeing with somebody that you have 50 things you already disagree on,” says William Doherty, professor in the department of family social science and director of the Citizen Professional Center at the University of Minnesota. “So it’s ‘How could you? I thought you shared my values. How could you be so wrong on something so important?’” Having already painfully sorted themselves into teams, Americans, especially those on the left, are discovering that the bonds that hold their team together are not as sturdy as they believed.

Read More: Where to Seek Help if the Israel-Hamas War Is Impacting Your Mental Health

Some people point to the hundreds who were killed or taken hostage in the massacre and decry the lack of outrage. Others focus on the thousands of reported deaths in Gaza, the communications blackout, and the limited aid entering the country even as the people have nowhere to go. They too decry the lack of outrage. Claims of misinformation and disinformation are frequent, as well as accusations of betrayal and complicity.

Michally and her mother had tried to talk about Gaza even before the current conflict. “There was some shelling going on between Hamas and Israel and my mom and I got in a huge fight, like screaming at each other,” says Michally, who calls her upbringing “culturally Jewish.” Her mother’s family fled Europe for Israel on the first ship they could get on in 1948, but Michally was born and raised in the U.S. In her view, Israel is doing to others what the Nazis did to her family during the war: expelling them from their homes and corralling them into fortified areas. “I love her and that will never change,” she says of her mother. “But I don’t respect her opinion on this one. I think it’s coming more from trauma than it is from stepping back and looking at the situation.”

She used to feel she could tell her mother anything. After Oct. 7, that changed. They tried to talk about it. “It was so obvious, the road it was going to go down, that I just backed up, she backed up, and we realized it’s better just not to open the door,” says Michally. That reticence has bled into other areas of her life; she’s keeping some recent health issues from her mother. “I don’t like seeing my family in those lights,” she says. “I don’t like thinking that they’re being inhumane.”

While these arguments and the fissures they’re causing are similar in some ways to the ones America has seen before, there are some stark differences. Doherty, who co-founded Braver Angels, an organization that tries to encourage discussion between people of opposing political views, says these go beyond left and right. “This is close to home for a lot of people. This has to do with religion, ethnicity. It has to do with life and death, with atrocities,” he says. Unlike the largely policy-driven disagreements of the past decade or so, there are visual representations of this conflict, which inflame passions even more. “We are seeing on our social media and our TV corpses and houses demolished and interviews with the families of hostages and the families of the dead,” says Doherty. “The word existential is overused, but this feels more like that—the survival, the literal survival of groups of people.”

Read More: After Hamas, Then What? Israel’s Undefined Endgame in Gaza

Hailey, who’s studying Judaism with a mind to convert, is finding it difficult to find allies in her liberal queer community. She had been a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America but let her membership lapse because she found the organization too aggressive in its pro-Palestinian stance. One friend in particular, who has been sending her pro-Palestinian talking points, keeps inviting her to events that she usually enjoys, but she can no longer face them. When Hailey tried to talk to her mom on the phone about how reactions to the events in Gaza have revealed to her how antisemitic America is, her mother pushed back and Hailey hung up. Even her husband didn’t seem to feel the same way. “It just feels really lonely,” says Hailey.  

One of the reasons these conversations are straining relationships anew could be that it’s the first war of this scale in the social media age in which so many Americans disagree on the power dynamics. In the Russia-Ukraine war, for example, it’s clear which country is the more vulnerable. And in the light of national dialogue about being a good ally, they feel duty-bound to support the less-privileged publicly, even though online discussions are difficult to carry out with any nuance and often spiral quickly into name-calling. “It ties into the primary narrative that drives so much of the conversation in the United States right now,” says Doherty. “The issue of colonial oppression, the narrative of who’s an oppressor group and who’s a victim group.” Depending on the era being examined, each side can make the case that they are the victims, they are the people who were driven out of land that was originally theirs.

A lot of that discussion is in turn inflected by the lens through which people view history. As a Black feminist, Kiesha, a consultant from Washington State, believes that her demonstration of solidarity with the oppressed, who in her view are the Palestinians, is more important than any one relationship. She has had painful conversations with people she cares about and who have been supportive of her in the past. “I was like, ‘Oh, I know where this is going and this is actually going to hurt,’” she says of one such conversation. “This is a moment where your values are being stretched and being pushed to the edge. And personal loss is on the table for you. Are you going to stay with your values?’” 

Kiesha stuck to her position, despite the discomfort. “You have that pit in your stomach that says, I might be about to lose someone I care about. And it just hurts,” she says. “After that situation happened, I had a whole panic attack.” But she feels that if she chooses to make her friend feel better instead of standing by what she thinks is better for all humanity, “then I would become useless to that work.” She’s not sure of the fate of the friendship because of things that have been said. “We may not still have the relationship that we have now” in the future, she says. “And that’s like grieving something tentatively.”

For Elissa, a writer in Connecticut, the pain has arisen less from what people have said to her, and more from the silence. “More than anything else, I have just felt a profound amount of real visceral sadness not only over the events of Oct. 7—I have family in Israel—but also the events in response to Oct. 7. I was really struck by who I heard from and who I didn’t hear from.” 

One close friend never contacted Elissa—who says her position is pro-peace rather than one side of the other—to see if she and her family were OK but published several anti-Israeli posts online. The message Elissa has gotten from that combination of actions is the friend assumes that because Elissa’s Jewish, she’s stridently pro-Israel and “we can’t have a conversation about it. And ‘I do not care if you’re OK or not, because, you know, your people deserve this.’” 

 “It’s worse now than I’ve ever seen it,” says Doherty of the belief that even talking to someone with different beliefs is morally compromising. “We’ve confounded actions that would be morally compromising with conversation across differences. How do we have a democratic society if we can’t debate the most difficult things—if the very conversation and the very relationship is ethically, morally compromised?” 

Ironically, the first person to contact Elissa after the attacks was a friend who is married to a Palestinian and has a Palestinian son. “She said, ‘I’m just checking in to see if you’re OK. You know, sorry. This is horrible,’” Elissa says. They’ve kept in touch. “I know that she is pro-peace as well,” she says. “This is an issue of humanity. That’s what this is.” 

For her part, Marina thinks it’s unlikely she and her best friend will ever be the same. “I don’t know this woman who posted this anymore,” she says. Her husband contacted his old friend to see if he could smooth out the situation. No dice. The two couples are no longer talking. “Betrayal is like having your arms broken,” Marina says, referring to a quote attributed to Leonid Tolstoy. “You know, you can forgive, but you can never hug again.”

source https://time.com/6329962/israel-hamas-personal-relationships-strain-us/

What to Know About Pakistan’s Deportation Deadline for Afghan Refugees

Moniza Kakar, a Karachi-based human rights lawyer, has been representing Afghan refugees in Pakistan’s courts since July 2022. In recent months, though, she’s noted a sharp increase in her caseload—in Karachi alone, more than 1,500 Afghans have faced arrest since September, 80% of whom were legally registered refugees. 

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The uptick in the city comes as Pakistan’s government has called for all undocumented migrants to leave the country by November 1 or face deportation. The decision largely stands to impact the 1.7 million Afghan refugees who live in the country without documentation, though experts tell TIME that many Afghans with proper documentation have found themselves swept up in the enforcement as well. 

The decision poses wide-reaching consequences, but it is not the first time the country has tried to crack down on the rights of refugees, says Hameed Hakimi, associate fellow at the Asia-Pacific Programme and Europe Programme at Chatham House. “To deflect blame from the challenges that the government or the country overall is facing, they always raised the issue of illegal immigrants chiefly from Afghanistan,” Hakimi says, noting that the blame game serves to “showcase that the country’s problem largely arises from neighboring countries instead of focusing internally on their own on their own government’s policies,” Hakimi says.

Read More: As Biden Responds to Iran-Linked Attacks With Air Strikes, Fears of a Wider War Grow

This especially rings true now, as the country is at a “historically low point,” Hakimi says. Pakistan is currently facing compounding crises— including dire economic prospects, humanitarian crises, and political instability, not to mention a recent wave of terrorism that experts say has been erroneously attributed to refugees.

“From a domestic socio-political and security environment point of view, this is the time for the state to show that it’s doing something about it. And the refugees seem to be a natural target of the state,” says Hakimi. 

Barriers to Entry

Pakistan has long hosted a large population of refugees from Afghanistan, dating back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. But 1.4 of the country’s 4 million Afghan refugees are undocumented—and the process of obtaining documentation is anything but easy, even for those who have long called the country home.

“These are families we have lived and struggled on both sides of the border. They have established their lives in Pakistan, they have their businesses and houses and their kids go to school there. Their children and grandchildren haven’t even seen Afghanistan, so they consider themselves blended Pakistanis now,” says Atta Nasib, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University. “But given that Pakistan doesn’t have a dual nationality law and Afghans mostly cannot receive Pakistani citizenship, they’re in a confused state at the moment.”

For refugees who recently arrived in the country following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, documentation of any kind is hard to come by—Pakistan failed to create a lasting plan for the 700,000 thousand Afghans who poured into the country “After the fall of Kabul, the UNHCR stopped issuing registration cards to Afghan refugees,” she says. “They only issued tokens which have no legal status in the courts of Pakistan.”

In a statement, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that the decision was compliant with the country’s domestic laws and was not targeted towards Afghans in particular or foreign nationals with legal residency. “The Government of Pakistan takes its commitments towards protection and safety needs of those in vulnerable situations with utmost seriousness. Our record of the last forty years in hosting millions of our Afghan brothers and sisters speaks for itself.”

In December 2021, a group of U.N. experts urged Pakistan to withhold from expelling undocumented Afghans until the country’s political situation allowed for safe return—an outcome that is still out of reach for many, including journalists, activists, and former government officials that are being targeted by the Taliban. 

“Hundreds of thousands of Afghans who entered Pakistan after August 2021 were only supposed to be there temporarily. Pakistan has never had a long-term plan or policy for its Afghan migrants, and making such pronouncements every few years is the flawed way it has dealt with them,” Madiha Afzal, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution told TIME in an email.

A ‘Human Rights Catastrophe’

The Pakistani government approved the creation of deportation centers in all provinces earlier this month and nearly 60,000 Afghans have already left the country ahead of the November 1 deadline. Pakistan is not a signatory of the Geneva Convention or the U.N. Refugee Convention, and the country’s ​Foreigners Act allows authorities to arrest, detain, and deport any foreigner that lacks proper documentation.

Read More: A Photographer Captures Death, Destruction, and Grief in Gaza

The UNHCR warned that the move could trigger a “human rights catastrophe.” Nasib notes that without support from international organizations, Pakistan does not have the resources to meet the demand. “How do you deal with like 4.4 million refugees without having some sort of monetary support from the international community, where you can provide them food, shelter, and medicine?” says Nasib. 

2,700 Afghans have been deported from Karachi alone since Kakar began working on refugee cases over a year ago. “They were human-rights defenders, school-going girls and they didn’t want to go back to Afghanistan,” she says, who says that the blanket claim of terrorism is unfair. “They are not criminals. They have a right to dignity,” says Kakar. Her female clients who have returned to Afghanistan have shared the challenges that come with being unable to attend school or work. “Families where the women were the bread earners are facing a lot of difficulty there.”

Despite Pakistan’s goal, the countries shared histories—and borders— mean that the two cannot be untangled. “You cannot separate Pakistan and Afghanistan, even in the future, because there’s so much history,” Nasib says. “It’s a love-hate relationship.”

—With reporting by Anna Gordon

source https://time.com/6330122/pakistan-afganistan-refugees/

How Prison Book Bans Dwarf All Other Censorship

On July 22, 2022 Texas prison authorities banned the second edition of Merriam-Webster’s Visual Dictionary, purportedly because there was an image of a weapon. This banned title was added to the 10,265 others that incarcerated people can’t read in Texas prisons.

Unfortunately, dictionaries aren’t the only kind of books banned by Texas corrections officials and their counterparts throughout the United States. As PEN America’s new report Reading Between the Bars shows, books banned in prisons by some states dwarf all other book censorship in school and public libraries.

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Prison censorship is rising steeply, robbing those behind bars of reading materials on everything from exercise and health to art and even yoga, often for reasons that strain credulity. One prime example of this is Clifton Collins, Jr. and Gustavo “Goose” Alvarez’s cookbook Prison Ramen, which is the most banned book in America and banned in 19 state prison systems. This cookbook contains stories before each recipe about the way the recipe was developed or a particularly meaningful time it was prepared and eaten. These stories detail what life is like inside and literature that affirms the realities of incarceration are widely censored. Similarly, Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power is the second most banned book in prisons. It’s a self-help book that explains power dynamics at play in interpersonal relationships and offers advice for how to manage them. The reason cited for the book’s ban is, “manipulation techniques.” Florida’s Department of Corrections has banned 11 of Greene’s books. Another book widely banned in prisons is The Art of War, a text written in 5th century BCE by Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, commonly banned for security concerns.

According to PEN America’s research, Florida ranks first in banning books in prisons, with 22,825 books banned (through this year). Kansas has censored 7,669 titles (up to 2021); Virginia 7,204 (up to 2022) and New York 5,356 (up to 2019). The ban on visual dictionaries is especially cruel, given they are designed to help people with basic or no literacy. Sixty percent of the U.S. prison population, roughly 720,000 people, are functionally illiterate. Learning to read from the dictionary is a time-honored tradition and dictionaries are the most sought books by incarcerated people. Malcolm X in his autobiography famously wrote about learning how to read from a dictionary while in prison. “I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary-to-study, to learn some words,” he explained. “I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened.”

Read More: The Extreme New Tactic in the Crusade to Ban Books

People who are functionally illiterate may be able to pronounce words as they read them on the page. They can sign their names to documents and they can read street signs or simple sentences. They can often read whole paragraphs but ask them what they just read and they won’t be able to tell you. Practice makes people better readers. The more your brain processes language, the faster you can process meaning, which is all the more reason for prisons to make books more widely and easily available.

The censorship becomes even more unfathomable when we consider how this process occurs. Books are banned in prisons by mailroom staff, tasked with skimming them and deciding which ones can be allowed or not. Fifty-four percent of American adults read below a sixth-grade level. Employment at correctional facilities requires a high school diploma which one third of employees have while an additional quarter have an associate degree. This means that staff empowered to censor books may have only basic literacy themselves.

Prisons are also targeting the written word by increasingly limiting access to any print literature. Missouri is the most recent state to begin censoring through a so-called “approved vendors only” policy that requires incarcerated people to purchase literature from a small list of businesses. This literally means incarcerated people in Missouri cannot receive books as gifts from family, a church, or a nonprofit. Policies like this have proliferated in recent years and severely limit how incarcerated people can access literature. Michigan, for example, has only five businesses where someone inside can purchase a book from.

Prison authorities cite the introduction of drugs into prisons through paper mail as the rationale for these policies, alleging that independent bookstores, publishers, and literacy nonprofits are either complicit in (and potentially even initiating) illicit drug smuggling. Incredibly, however, Departments of Corrections have so far not provided substantial and sustained evidence that the primary conduit of drugs into prisons. Most evidence actually points to staff as the primary conduit of contraband into carceral facilities. And yet, much more effort, time, and money is being devoted to censoring reading materials.

Censorship is oppressive and even leads to a decline in mental health. Martin Lizarragar, who is incarcerated in California, said that this type of oppression has not only hurt himself, but also his family and community. “It has even, on one occasion, broke me down to tears,” Lizarragar told PEN America. “This just isn’t right.”

We are right to ask whether the underlying rationale is aimed at foreclosing community, restricting potential interactions, and denying that incarcerated people are still members of society whose voices should be heard and merit access to information as we all do.

source https://time.com/6329800/prison-book-bans-censorship-essay/

Hurricane Otis Death Toll Rises to 43 in Mexico as Search and Recovery Work Continues

ACAPULCO, Mexico — At least 43 people died when Category 5 Hurricane Otis slammed into Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, the governor of hard-hit Guerrero said Sunday as the death toll continued to climb.

Gov. Evelyn Salgado said on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, that the number of missing also rose to 36 from 10 a day earlier. That increase came after authorities had raised the toll to 39 on Saturday.

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In Acapulco, families began to bury the dead on Sunday and continued the search for essentials while government workers and volunteers cleared streets clogged with muck and debris from the powerful Category 5 hurricane.

More resources were arriving as searchers recovered more bodies from Acapulco’s harbor and from beneath fallen trees and other storm debris.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Saturday that his opponents are trying to inflate the toll to damage him politically, but with hundreds of families still awaiting word from loved ones it was likely to keep rising.

Otis roared ashore early Wednesday with devastating 165 mph (266 kph) winds after strengthening so rapidly that people had little time to prepare.

Kristian Vera stood on an Acapulco beach Saturday looking out toward dozens of sunken boats, including three of her own, all marked by floating buoys or just poking out of the water.

Despite losing her livelihood in Otis’ brutal pass through Mexico’s over Pacific coast, the 44-year-old fisher felt fortunate. Earlier in the day, she watched a body pulled from the water and saw families coming and going, looking for their loved ones.

Many people rode out on boats what had started as a tropical storm and in just 12 hours powered up into a catastrophic Category 5 hurricane.

Vera took turns with four others swimming out with empty gas jugs for flotation to try to raise their sunken boats from the shallow harbor.

Leaning against a small wooden fishing boat like her own, tipped on its side on a beach strewn with trash and fallen trees, she explained that some of the people who died were either fishermen caring for their boats or yacht captains who were told by their owners that they needed to make sure their boats were OK when Otis was still a tropical storm.

“That night I was so worried because I live off of this, it’s how I feed my kids,” Vera said. “But when I began to feel how strong the wind was, I said, ‘Tomorrow I won’t have a boat, but God willing, Acapulco will see another day.’”

Military personnel and volunteers had worked along Acapulco’s main tourist strip Saturday and Salgado announced Sunday that the boulevard had been cleared of debris.

But on the periphery of the city, neighborhoods remained in ruins. Salgado also said that the national electric company reported restoring power to 58% of homes and businesses in Acapulco and 21 water tankers were distributing water to outlying neighborhoods.

Aid has been slow to arrive. The storm’s destruction cut off the city of nearly 1 million people for the first day, and because Otis had intensified so quickly on Tuesday little to nothing had been staged in advance.

The military presence swelled to 15,000 in the area. López Obrador had called on the armed forces to set up checkpoints in the city to deter looting and robbery.

The federal civil defense agency tallied 220,000 homes that were damaged by the storm, he said.

source https://time.com/6329737/hurricane-otis-death-toll-missing-mexico/

Palestinian Death Toll Passes 8,000 as U.N. Aid Warehouses Suffer Break-Ins

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Thousands of people broke into aid warehouses in Gaza to take flour and basic hygiene products, a U.N. agency said Sunday, in a mark of growing desperation and the breakdown of public order three weeks into the war between Israel and Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers.

Tanks and infantry pushed into Gaza over the weekend as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a “second stage” in the war, which was ignited by Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 incursion into Israel. Israel also pounded the territory from air, land and sea.

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Gaza’s Health Ministry said the death toll among Palestinians has passed 8,000 — mostly women and minors. It’s a toll without precedent in decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence, and it is expected to climb even more rapidly as Israel presses its ground offensive. Over 1,400 people have died on the Israeli side, mainly civilians killed during the initial Hamas onslaught.

Communications were restored to much of Gaza early Sunday after a bombardment described by Gaza residents as the most intense of the war knocked out most contact with the territory late Friday. The besieged enclave’s 2.3 million people were largely cut off from the world.

The Israeli military said Sunday it had struck over 450 militant targets over the past 24 hours, including Hamas command centers and anti-tank missile launching positions. It said more ground forces were sent into Gaza overnight, and officials circulated footage showing tanks and troops operating in open areas.

The warehouse break-ins were “a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down after three weeks of war and a tight siege on Gaza,” said Thomas White, Gaza director for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA. “People are scared, frustrated and desperate.”

UNRWA provides basic services to hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza. Its schools across the territory have been transformed into packed shelters housing Palestinians displaced by the conflict. Israel has allowed only a small trickle of aid to enter from Egypt, some of which was stored in one of the warehouses that was broken into, UNRWA said.

Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for the agency, said the crowds broke into four facilities on Saturday. She said the warehouses did not contain any fuel, which has been in critically short supply since Israel cut off all shipments after the start of the war.

Israeli authorities said Sunday that they would soon allow more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, though details remained unclear.

Elad Goren, the head of civil affairs of COGAT, the Israeli defense body responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs, said Israel had established a “humanitarian zone” near the southern city of Khan Younis and recommended that Palestinians flee there.

But he provided no details on the exact location of the zone or how much aid would be available. He also said Israel has opened two water lines in southern Gaza within the past week. The AP could not independently verify that either line was functioning.

Meanwhile, residents living near Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, said Israeli airstrikes overnight hit near the hospital complex and blocked many roads leading to it. Israel accuses Hamas of having a secret command post beneath the hospital but has not provided much evidence. Hamas denies the allegations.

Tens of thousands of civilians are sheltering in Shifa, which is also packed with wounded patients.

“Reaching the hospital has become increasingly difficult,” Mahmoud al-Sawah, who is sheltering in the hospital, said over the phone. “It seems they want to cut off the area.” Another Gaza City resident, Abdallah Sayed, said the Israeli bombing over the past two days was “the most violent and intense” since the war started.

The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said another Gaza City hospital received two calls from Israeli authorities on Sunday ordering it to evacuate. It said airstrikes have hit as close as 50 meters (yards) from the Al-Quds Hospital, where 12,000 people are sheltering.

Israel ordered the hospital to evacuate more than a week ago, but it and other medical facilities have refused, saying evacuation would mean death for patients on ventilators.

“We reiterate — it’s impossible to evacuate hospitals full of patients without endangering their lives,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on social media.

There was no immediate Israeli comment on the latest evacuation order or the strikes near Shifa.

Israel says most residents have heeded its orders to flee to the southern part of the besieged territory, but hundreds of thousands remain in the north, in part because Israel has also bombarded targets in so-called safe zones.

An Israeli airstrike hit a two-story house in Khan Younis on Sunday, killing at least 13 people, including 10 from one family. The bodies were brought to the nearby Nasser Hospital, according to an Associated Press journalist at the scene.

The escalation has ratcheted up domestic pressure on Israel’s government to secure the release of some 230 hostages seized when Hamas fighters from Gaza breached Israel’s defenses and stormed into nearby towns, gunning down civilians and soldiers in a surprise attack.

Desperate family members met with Netanyahu on Saturday and expressed support for an exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

Hamas says it is ready to release all hostages if Israel releases all of the thousands of Palestinians held in its prisons. Israel has dismissed the offer.

Netanyahu said Saturday that Israel is determined to bring back all the hostages, and that the expanding ground operation “will help us in this mission.”

“This is the second stage of the war, whose objectives are clear: to destroy the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas and bring the hostages home,” he said in a televised address.

The Israeli military said it was gradually expanding its ground operations inside Gaza, while stopping short of calling it an all-out invasion. Casualties on both sides are expected to rise sharply as Israeli forces and Palestinian militants battle in dense residential areas.

When asked about Israel’s military escalation, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told ABC’s “This Week”: “Ultimately, these are their decisions. This is their action, and they’re best postured to be able to answer questions about how it’s proceeding.” On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” he said the U.S. believes “there should be humanitarian pauses to get hostages out, potentially to get aid in.”

Despite the Israeli offensive, Palestinian militants have continued firing rockets into Israel, with the constant sirens in southern Israel a reminder of the threat.

Israel says its strikes target Hamas fighters and infrastructure and that the militants operate among civilians, putting them in danger. An estimated 1,800 people remain trapped beneath the rubble, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which has said it bases its estimates on distress calls it received.

More than 1.4 million people across Gaza have fled their homes, nearly half crowding into U.N. schools and shelters, following repeated warnings by the Israeli military that they would be in danger if they remained in northern Gaza.

Gaza’s sole power plant shut down shortly after the start of the war, and Israel has allowed no fuel to enter, saying Hamas would use it for military purposes.

Hospitals are struggling to keep emergency generators running to operate incubators and other life-saving equipment, and UNRWA is also trying to keep water pumps and bakeries running to meet essential needs.

At Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, emergency director Dr. Mohammed Qandeel said about 20,000 civilians were sheltering there. “I brought my kids to sleep here,” said one displaced resident who gave her name only as Umm Ahmad. “I used to be afraid of my kids playing in the sand. Now their hands are dirty with the blood on the floor.”

source https://time.com/6329691/gaza-palestinian-death-toll-aid-warehouses/