Displaying items by tag: USA

Less than three months after winning a Supreme Court case backing his religious freedom of expression, Colorado Christian cake artist Jack Phillips is facing yet another battle. A new complaint was recently filed against him after an attorney asked him to make a cake pink on the inside and blue on the outside, representing a transition from male to female, to celebrate a gender transition. Phillips declined to make the cake, because of his religious beliefs. On 15 August attorneys representing him and his Masterpiece Cakeshop filed a lawsuit to fight this new complaint, which they said constituted a ‘doubling down of anti-religious hostility’ by Colorado officials. They said, ‘Colorado is ignoring the message of the US Supreme Court by continuing to single out Jack for punishment and to exhibit hostility toward his religious beliefs.’

Jamie Carlton posted a video on Facebook showing three children - Haylie, 13, brother Reagan, 6, and their friend Ashley - returning a wallet containing $700 to its rightful owner. The kids are heard saying, ‘We found your wallet outside your car and we just thought we would give it back to you’. One of them hides it by the door and says, ‘I'm going to put it over here so no one takes any money’. When the children were contacted, Haylie said that they thought it would be a good thing to do because they really didn't need the money. Jamie said, ‘This happened at my house in Aurora, Colorado. If this doesn't renew or at least refresh your faith in humanity, you need help.’

On 6 July we prayed for those fighting 70 wildfires across California, Colorado, and eastern Canada. By 2 August the California fires had reached ‘uncharted territory’ in what has become an endless summer of flame. Over 1,000 homes were torched in just one of the enormous wildfires that have scorched 320,000 acres, killed, maimed and left whole communities homeless. Pray for those in small close communities struggling to provide disaster relief efforts while also being directly impacted by the disaster themselves. Pray for good communication and networking between churches and aid agencies and those needing shelter, household supplies, food and clothing. Pray for families sheltering in churches, schools, community buildings, etc. after evacuating their homes, who have no idea when they will be able to return home, or if they even still have a home to go to. Pray for communities in shock after fire damage, and for others watching fires advance.

The USA has the greatest inequalities, highest mortality rate, most regressive taxes, and largest public subsidies for bankers and billionaires of any developed capitalist country. According to the IRS, billionaire tax evasion amounts to $458 billion dollars in lost public revenues annually. Corporations sheltered over $2.5 trillion dollars in overseas tax havens and they paid no taxes. Bankers earned billions in profits from mortgage foreclosures of working class households through ‘favourable’ legal rulings. Over 20 million individuals lost their properties due to illegal or fraudulent debts. Silicon Valley’s billionaires pay manual and service workers poverty level wages. Class inequalities are reinforced by ethnic divisions. White, Chinese and Indian multi-millionaires exploit Afro-American, Latin American, Vietnamese and Filipino workers. Inequalities are a result of low wages, based on big profits, financial swindles, multi-trillion dollar public handouts and multi-billion-dollar tax evasion.

Across the US there is growth in organisations portraying Islam as a threat, in what has become known as the Islamophobia industry. It has more than tripled in two years. An Al-Jazeera investigation revealed the tactics they use to instigate a fear of Islam, including manipulating social media to create a false narrative that Muslims are trying to take over the country. Anti-Muslim messages proliferate in social media with bought-in followers, fake accounts, and robotic amplifiers. The investigation also shows how the organisations suppress the rise of a Muslim political voice in America, and uncovers how ‘dark money’ is fuelling them - tens of millions of dollars funnelled through anonymous donor funds. The report unveiled the donors of the dark money; a strategy of infiltrating US university courses and monitoring mosques; a filmed training session by an ex-FBI Agent teaching ‘theories’ about Muslims; and connections between key members of the Trump administration and the Islamophobia industry.

A Georgia police officer’s body camera showed him striking a fleeing suspect with his patrol car. He first attempted to block the fleeing man by swerving onto the kerb, then steered back onto the road and hit him from behind. After much deliberation, investigations were finally carried out and his employment was terminated. In Florida a family is calling for justice after a federal jury cleared a sheriff’s deputy of using excessive force when he shot a man dead in the man’s garage. The family were awarded just $4 in damages, that’s £3.06p, for funeral expenses and pain and suffering in a wrongful death lawsuit. The man was a 30-year-old African American and father of three.  The deputy was responding to a noise complaint about music coming from his garage. Over two years ago Amnesty International reported ‘Hundreds of men and women are killed by police each and every year across the United States’.

In May, Amnesty International said the US government must stop separating asylum-seeking parents from their children and denying them access to asylum procedures through prolonged detention when they present themselves at the US-Mexico border. On 20 June Donald Trump ended this policy, following days of public outrage. Many asylum-seekers are fleeing violent countries which abuse human rights (such as Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala). They usually cross Mexico in caravans, as travelling in a group is safer in dangerous places. Although Trump seeks to brand them as criminals, it is not a crime to seek asylum at official border posts. Recently members of a caravan and their representatives marched through the streets of Tijuana to the border crossing point saying, ‘We are not criminals, we are the hope of Latin America’.

Donald Trump appears to have succeeded in negotiations with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un where his predecessors failed. However, the lesson of previous deals (in 1994 and 2005) is ‘it is easier to reach agreements than to implement them’. Pray for practical progress towards disarmament and a united Korean peninsula. North Korea state media said Donald Trump had told Kim Jong-un that he would ease sanctions on Pyongyang, in language that suggested a different interpretation from the one put forward by the US president. Pray for clarity of communications and unity of thought and purpose in future decision-making. Trump said the US agreed to suspend military exercises with South Korea. However, US military in South Korea said that they had received no updated guidance on stopping training exercises. The announcement raised fears in South Korea that Washington was making concessions too fast, and a curt statement said that it was trying to figure out Mr Trump’s intentions. For a media report, click the ‘More’ button.

One of the underlying motivations for the American Revolution was to industrialise, and reverse the crippling trade deficit with Britain. Protectionism and trade barriers were the USA's de facto policy for trading until 1947, when it switched to free trade after most of its industrial competitors were wiped out by the war. It signed up to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), whose overall purpose was to promote international trade by reducing or eliminating trade barriers such as tariffs or quotas, ‘on a reciprocal and mutually advantageous basis’. GATT morphed into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995, but its original text is still in effect. Pray that current international debates will draw countries back to the roots of GATT and WTO, to reduce or even eliminate trade barriers.

Kim Yong Chol, a top lieutenant of Kim Jong-Un, is meeting with US secretary of state Mike Pompeo in New York, in one of three sets of parallel talks aimed at salvaging a summit between Kim and Donald Trump. Lower-level officials have been meeting at the inter-Korean border and in Singapore for other pre-summit negotiations. South Korea's president said, ‘Kim Jong-un believes a face-to-face meeting with US President Donald Trump could put an end to the history of war between the two nations.’ Pray that this hope is realised. He also said that Kim had reaffirmed his commitment to ‘complete’ denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula when they had a surprise meeting at the demilitarised zone. Pray for Pyongyang and Washington to agree on a roadmap of talks that will resolve their differences.