You know one thing that happens when you make undocumented immigrants afraid of the authorities? In addition to things like: they don’t go to the doctor or the dentist, they drop out of school, they don’t apply for library cards, they can’t call anyone in emergencies?

Multiple victims of domestic assault — who are living in the U.S. without proper documentation — are refusing to testify in a Denver courthouse out of fears of being deported, according to city officials.

Since President Donald Trump‘s executive order on immigration was issued on Jan. 25, at least four victims of domestic violence are unwilling to testify in court, said Denver City Attorney Kristin Bronson on Friday to ABC News affiliate KMGH.

NPR has more details on the Tuam human remains story.

Authorities in Ireland say they have excavated the human remains of an undisclosed number of young children from the site of a former home for unmarried mothers.

The home, located in the town of Tuam, was operated by the Bon Secours nuns beginning in the 1920s and was home to women and babies until the 1960s. For years, some in the region had suspected there was a mass grave on the site.

That’s a good deal clearer and more blunt than RTE was. It was a Catholic home (aka an informal prison) for unmarried mothers in 1920s-1960s Catholic Ireland. We can be sure those mothers were not treated … Read the rest

Oh lord – remember the former Catholic mother and baby home in Tuam, Ireland, where human remains were found in the grounds?

They’ve found more. Lots more. RTE reports:

“Significant quantities” of human remains have been discovered at the site of the former mother-and-baby home in Tuam, Co Galway.

It comes after the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation began test excavations at the site of the children’s burial ground on the Dublin Road housing estate in Tuam, Co Galway in October 2016.

The commission was established following allegations about the deaths of 800 babies in Tuam over a number of decades and the manner in which they were buried.

In a statement today, the commission said significant

He sounds nice.

A Polish lawmaker is facing punishment from the European Parliament after telling a colleague that it was right that women earn less than men — “because they are weaker, they are smaller, they are less intelligent.”

The comments were made by Janusz Korwin-Mikke on Wednesday evening, but came to widespread attention Thursday after the Socialists and Democrats Group in the European Parliament released footage of the comments.

Well anyway he has a point. Clearly Elizabeth Warren, for instance, is way less intelligent than, say, Donald Trump. All men are more intelligent than all women, so systematically paying them less would make sense.

Korwin-Mikke has faced censure from parliamentary authorities three times before. In 2014, he

Did Trump sign a secret executive order telling customs and border patrol to keep out as many brown foreigners as possible? Because if he didn’t, I don’t see why the Tibetan women’s football team was denied visas to come here for a tournament in Texas.

They say they were told they had “no good reason” to visit the US.

Most of the players are Tibetan refugees living in India, and had applied at the US embassy in Delhi.

India isn’t one of Trump’s random “seven countries.” Neither is Tibet.

Cassie Childers, the executive director of Tibet Women’s Soccer and a US citizen, told the BBC that she had accompanied the group of 16 players for interviews at the embassy

This is creepy.

As you probably know, that’s the widow of the Navy SEAL who was killed on the raid in Yemen that Trump approved over dinner one evening.

What’s creepy is Ivanka Trump.

The normal reaction to people crying is to choke up oneself. That’s how innumerable poignant movies work, and it applies in real life, too. Ivanka looks as if she were watching a weather report.

In general I stay away from Trump’s relatives, but there are exceptions. Melania’s lawsuit against a blogger was one, and this is another. The whole manipulative use of Carryn Owens was sickening, and Ivanka’s glacial calm is creepy as fuck.… Read the rest

Richard Wolffe at the Guardian isn’t fooled.

The sheer effort required to start a speech by condemning racist murders and antisemitic attacks was historic. After all, earlier in the day, the same president had suggested all those bomb threats to Jewish community centers were the work of his political opponents “to make others look bad”.

And in between the two he suddenly became a completely different person. Yeah, that’s it.

“The time for small thinking is over,” said this president of exceedingly large thinking. “The time for trivial fights is behind us.”

Those trivial fights are so far behind us that it’s been a full two days since he tweeted that the Russian stories were just a Democratic