Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Mahmoud was well into his shift making bread when a burst of urgent shouts warned him of an approaching cordon of men in uniform.
Time was of the essence, and the 19-year-old, ever alert, wasted none of it.
By the time the immigration officers barged into the bakery, trawling for those without proper documents, Mahmoud was already dashing up a nearby flight of stairs. He stopped only after reaching the seventh floor of the building, located on the southern outskirts of Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur.
“I watched out from the window and saw they had detained many young people,” Mahmoud says. “They took all my friends,” he adds, his softly spoken voice slightly at odds with his towering stature.
“I hid until they left.”
“I think I lost my life here.”
With no legal status or protection, Yemeni refugees in Malaysia are stuck in a life of limbo. pic.twitter.com/YsDypoPsQq
Mahmoud is Yemeni. Like thousands before him, he escaped his country’s catastrophic war a year ago to seek refuge in Malaysia – one of a handful of countries worldwide to offer visa-free entry to Yemenis.
But today, Mahmoud is part of a struggling community pushed into a fragile existence in society’s shadows.
Malaysia is not a signatory to the United Nations convention recognising refugees, while its dated immigrations laws – enacted in 1959 and revised in 1963 – do not distinguish between those seeking asylum and those entering the country irregularly.
As a result, refugees are denied a host of rights and, crucially, are barred from legally working and sending their children to state-run schools.
Without key legal protections and given little aid, refugees end up scraping a precarious living in informal sectors – and in the case of most Yemenis, taking on low-paying jobs in restaurants and other food stores owned by their compatriots who had settled in Malaysia in the years and decades before the war.
“There is no money and life is insecure,” says Mahmoud, who sees his dream of becoming a doctor slipping away. “I feel lost.”
Yemen’s latest conflict broke out in late 2014 when Houthi rebels, allied with forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, seized much of the country, including the capital, Sanaa.
The war escalated in March 2015 when a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched a fierce air campaign against the rebels in a bid to restore the internationally recognised government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
Since then, tens of thousands of civilians and combatants have been killed and as many as 85,000 children may have starved to death.
Millions of people have been forced from their homes as a result, with many fleeing for safer shores abroad. Some have sought refuge in Malaysia – a country which in the past has acted to protect persecuted Muslim populations from places as Bosnia, Syria and Cambodia.
Malaysian authorities have long allowed the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) register refugees and provide some services on humanitarian grounds, even though the country has never ratified the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol.
UNHCR cardholders, however, are denied the right to work and go to school in the country. The government provides a 50 percent discount to those officially recognised as refugees to access healthcare services at state-run premises.
But registration itself can take months or years, leaving many waiting to receive their card at risk of being arrested and locked up at any time. Even if they are registered, as in the case of Mahmoud and his friends last month, refugees remain liable for detention under Malaysian law should they be caught working – although some officers are willing to turn a blind eye during immigration raids.
There are currently more than 3,100 Yemenis officially registered with UNHCR in Malaysia, while thousands more are unregistered. Overall, about 165,000 refugees and asylum seekers are signed up with the agency in the Southeast Asian country, with the vast majority hailing from Myanmar, mainly members of its majority-Muslim Rohingya minority.
101 East: Malaysia’s unwanted (26:01)
Alice Nah, a Malaysian academic and an expert on refugee issues, says those seeking asylum in Malaysia – a popular destination because of its strong economy and peaceful multi-ethnic society – are often “surprised” by the way they are being targeted in immigration operations.
“[That’s] not necessarily because they are refugees fleeing war and persecution, but because they are perceived to be migrants with irregular status,” she adds, urging authorities to “recognise current realities and take the protection of refugees and other non-citizens seriously”.
Activists have also been calling on Malaysia’s new government, which took office last year after defeating a ruling coalition that had governed the country for six decades, to fulfill campaign promises over human rights reforms and sign up to the Refugee Convention and its Protocol.
When asked last month by Al Jazeera about Yemeni refugees’ access to work and education, Saifudin Abdullah, Malaysia’s foreign minister, replied: “I think we are open to proposals.”
Four years of Yemen war leaves economy in ruins (2:53)
Still, Malaysia’s longstanding refugee policies ensure Yemeni refugees remain in a state of near constant fear and uncertainty, deterring them from being able to think of the country as home.
“How can we feel it’s our home, without having any rights?” asks Badria Mohammed Albadani, who fled Yemen’s war four years ago. “We want to feel like that but they have to help us … to have education and at the same time allow us to have a job without the fear that someone will come and attack us.”
A former airline employee in Sanaa, 36-year-old Albadani is now a volunteer coordinator at a community-run centre that helps fleeing Yemenis.
Mohammed al-Radhy [Hassan Ghani/Al Jazeera]
Located on the first floor of a rundown, southern Kuala Lumpur building and overlooking a street lined with Arab shops and restaurants, the modest space offers language lessons to Yemeni men, women and children, as well as workshops and community advocacy.
“We try to give some things and skills to the people that they need fast,” says Mohammed al-Radhy, a community leader and the head of the Tangible Association of Yemeni Refugees (TAYR).
“Before this centre, the people were [dispersed] everywhere. If they needed any kind of help they didn’t know where to ask. Now, if anyone needs help, if they have a health problem or are arrested or they need to ask about anything, they directly call and we give them the help we can,” Radhy adds.
After a brief pause to check his continuously flashing phone, the 46-year-old admits that he is rarely at the centre he founded three years ago.
“I work in my car; I [am always going] to the hospitals, to the prisons, to meet NGOs, to the families.
“We need help,” he says, with a sigh. “We have no permit to work, no education, no health(care). We have nothing.”
The centre offers English and Malay language lessons [Hassan Ghani/Al Jazeera]
Inside the TAYR centre, Mokhtar bin Dorob teaches an afternoon English class to a small group of young students. He is also a volunteer, making do with whatever meagre – if any – amounts the students can afford to chip in. The owner of a Master’s degree in educational technology, the 34-year-old is passionate about using online tools to help improve the lives of his community.
“I’m trying to use WhatsApp to create videos for the students to interact,” he says, standing between two battered, oscillating fans that cool the stiflingly humid air. “I’m interested in integrating technology to help Yemenis with the barriers [they face].”
But it’s not just in informal classrooms that technology has had an effect. In the absence of institutionalised support, many Yemeni refugees are increasingly relying messaging-app groups to share news about the community, discuss problems and coordinate action – as well as warn each other about immigration raids and even generate some much-needed income.
“I sell bread by [taking orders on] WhatsApp,” says Amira, a 39-year-old mother of two daughters. “At times, there’s work and at others there isn’t – for example this month, I’ve only had two orders.”
Amira says she and her husband “sold everything” four years ago to flee air raids in the southwestern Yemeni city of Taiz and bring their children to safety.
Amira and her two young daughters in their flat in Kuala Lumpur [Hassan Ghani/Al Jazeera]
But since arriving in Malaysia, the family’s ordeal has only continued.
“When we first got here, we felt humiliated; we’d only have one meal per day,” says Amira.
The hallway outside Amira’s flat, in the gargantuan apartment block housing hundreds of Yemeni and other migrant families [Hassan Ghani/Al Jazeera]
“After we got the [UNHCR] card, they said they would help us but we didn’t get anything,” she adds.
“When my story spread on Facebook, university students offered me housing here,” she continues.
But the situation remains dire. Amira says she was previously exploited by local employers who turned out to be “crooks”, while her husband, a chef, has been struggling with severe health problems that prevent him from working.
“We left from war and found ourselves in another war,” Amira says, her two daughters – aged four and seven – sitting quietly at her feet. “War with hunger, war with housing.”
Stuck in a life of limbo, Amira says her only wish is for her family to be resettled to another country where her “daughters feel safe and can acquire an education and [a better life].
“The most important thing is my children’s future,” she says, her voice choking with tears. The most important thing is that they will not be lost.
The last few times Ady Barkan got arrested in the U.S. Capitol building, the routine had a few new twists. Officers no longer handcuffed him, since he had lost nearly all his capacity for movement. They just put a bracelet on one of his wrists to show he was in custody.
His motorized wheelchair is heavy, and it can take a while to get it into the police van, so Aiyana or Nate or some other member of the large crew that supports him—Ady’s Roadies, they sometimes call themselves—will pour a little water into his mouth while they wait, or, following his whispered suggestions, fire off a text to news media or other activists.
Story Continued Below
“The Capitol Police treat me pretty well,” says Barkan, who has been arrested seven times over the past two years—or maybe eight, he can’t exactly remember. “Some of them gave us the thumbs up when we left the holding pen and said, ‘Keep up the good work.’”
Barkan’s last arrest was in September, at a protest against Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation. A few days later, he was back at the Capitol for Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony and used the moment to start a Facebook fundraising campaign, right on the spot, for whoever decided to run against Sen. Chuck Grassley in 2022. “Be a Hero,” said the Facebook post that went up, complete with a donate button and video of Barkan speaking haltingly but angrily outside Grassley’s office, after the Iowa senator threw his weight behind Kavanaugh at the hearing.
Over the past 15 months Barkan has emerged as one of the most compelling figures of the new activist left. At age 35, with a 2-year-old son, he is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a disease with no cure. As the disease rapidly progresses, he has managed to turn his body into a kind of campaign tool, laying it in front of members of Congress, news cameras and activists to inspire action for health care, immigrants and the election of progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Until December 7, 2017, Barkan was an earnest but obscure young progressive, one with a very focused policy agenda but little national profile. That day he buttonholed Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who happened to be flying home to Phoenix from Washington on the plane Barkan was traveling on, about the GOP’s massive tax bill.
Barkan told Flake that the measure would swell the deficit and eventually make it impossible to pay for health care—even his health care, which was getting more expensive every month. He asked Flake to withhold his support for the tax cut. “Why not take a stand now? You can be an American hero! You really can!” Barkan pleaded. “You could save my life.”
They ended up talking for about 12 minutes, Flake standing in the aisle and listening respectfully but disagreeing with every point, while Barkan’s seatmate, a fellow activist, recorded the interaction. She uploaded the video to YouTube, it was reposted on Twitter and Facebook, and within a week Barkan was being interviewed on CNN, Pod Save America and other media.
At one level, it didn’t work: On Dec. 19, Flake dutifully joined the rest of the Senate’s Republicans and voted for the tax bill. But in the constant war for national attention, the confrontation was an unalloyed success. Barkan’s group, the Center for Popular Democracy, used its viral popularity on the left to launch a new campaign aimed at firing up Democrats for the midterms. “Be a Hero,” it was called. If Barkan could travel across the country, braving pain and discomfort, fear, bad food, repeated arrests and separation from his wife and small child—if a dying man could make this kind of commitment, why couldn’t you?
One might think the group was using him for publicity, but that wasn’t it. Barkan was using himself; like a Buddhist monk protesting the war in Vietnam by setting himself on fire, he wanted his own misery to spark a change of heart and policy.
Last fall, when Senate corridors filled with activists trying to stop the Kavanaugh confirmation, many wore “Be a Hero” T-shirts. And though they failed to stop Kavanaugh, who was seen on the left as uniquely hostile to causes like universal health care, the organizing they stimulated may have contributed to the 39-seat midterm seat swing for Democrats. Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi tweeted her thanks with admiration: “Your passion for saving our health care and charting a new path for progressive change were an inspiration throughout the campaign,” she wrote to Barkan. “Your labor of love helped us win the House.”
By that time, Barkan was back in Santa Barbara with his wife and son. His health was getting progressively worse.
***
Latin American revolutionaries used to have an expression, “Sé como el Che” (Be like Che), referring to Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary who left a powerful role in Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba to join a doomed jungle guerrilla campaign in Bolivia. Now, for a certain segment of the American left, the catchword was, “Be like Ady,” who like Che was doomed, although not by choice. Barkan’s Twitter handle said it all: “Fighting for social justice and America’s democracy. Living with @rachael_scar and Baby Carl. Dying of ALS.”
Barkan, a graduate of Columbia University and Yale Law School, was born in 1984 to Israeli immigrants and grew up in Claremont and Pasadena, Calif. As a child, he stayed at the dinner table to talk with his parents, who were academics. Some kids dream of playing baseball or becoming firefighters or building stuff; after reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” as a kid, Barkan says, he decided to become a lawyer for the poor and disadvantaged.
He first came to national attention with the 2014 Fed Up campaign, which took a very narrow but specific policy goal: to diversify the regional boards of the Federal Reserve, pressuring the Fed to keep interest rates low in part by considering the interests of working people, not just finance-sector millionaires. Launching a direct-action campaign at one of the most opaque bodies in American government was an idea both quixotic and serious (and novel enough to get Barkan named to the POLITICO 50 list of innovators that year). He was “a spectacularly creative and vibrant organizer,” said Ben Wikler, Washington director of the left-center activist group MoveOn.org.
“The important thing to know about Ady is, he emerged fully formed,” says Nate Smith, a longtime friend who accompanies and assists Barkan on some of his travels. As teenagers, they planted campaign signs opposing a 2000 ban on gay marriage in California. “I met him when we were 14, but he was probably like this when he was 5.”
He was 32 when he got the diagnosis. It was in October 2016, and at a brunch in Los Angeles, another old friend, neurologist Katie Cross, examined the stiffness in his left hand and said he should get tested. The results changed his life forever.
As many as 30,000 Americans, at any given point, have ALS, a process that kills motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. ALS patients gradually lose the ability to walk, to move, to eat, and eventually to breathe. The average age of diagnosis is 55. Barkan was more than two decades younger when he was diagnosed, and he and his wife, University of California Santa Barbara English professor Rachael King, had a new baby. ALS is always fatal, usually within five years.
Barkan decided to pursue every medical option available to him, but there weren’t many, and rest wasn’t particularly recommended in the treatment of ALS. So without much debate or turmoil, he decided to put his affliction to use and hit the road. His own frail body would take center stage in a campaign to protect Obamacare and push for a broader, public-funded health care system, and to flip Congress in 2018.
He would keep agitating for the causes he believed in. The only difference was that now, some of them were playing out in his own body. Barkan and King had met at Columbia, where she was an editor at the campus newspaper, the Spectator, and he contributed reporting and op-eds. Barkan was the kind of person to go all-in on things—friendships, work, politics, love, and when it came to deciding how he’d live in his ALS-shortened days, King supported his decision. She refers to a quotation in essayist Rebecca Solnit’s elegy to activism, Hope in the Dark: “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.”
“There’s a parallel universe where he’s sitting at home, angry at this cosmic injustice that’s befallen him,” says Smith. But instead Barkan channeled it, he says. “‘Be a Hero’ is an interesting pitch. … He’s saying, don’t just sit at home and be a victim. You’re angry and pissed off and exasperated. Get some friends and come to Washington, D.C.”
Barkan’s grave condition and gritty determination would inspire many on the left during a dire political moment. With Trump sweeping into office, and Republicans finally executing on their policy goals, American liberals had a grim year—stunned by unforeseen misfortune, powerless and sad. But not quite ready to give up the fight. And now, propelled by the video, they had a new hero available: Ady Barkan, who had stood and tilted at a GOP windmill while facing a future as black as imaginable.
“Ady has become the moral center of gravity in the major social justice issues of the Trump era,” Wikler says. “Everyone has to ask themselves, if they only had a short time to live, what they would do? … He strikes a deeper chord than people are used to seeing in the public arena.”
Civil disobedience had not been part of Barkan’s game plan in the past, but it was central to the post-ALS campaign, when putting his body on the line suddenly had so much more gravitas and visibility. “I’ve got a pretty sad story at the moment,” he says. As Berkeley Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio had once put it, there was a time to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus.”
***
Politics has its rhythms, and so does ALS. Last summer, Barkan and a revolving crew of colleagues trekked in a caravan from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to upstate New York, Maine and back again, mobilizing voters, getting arrested, and campaigning for Democrats.
Traveling in a wheelchair-accessible van purchased with help from a GoFundMe campaign, Barkan spoke with veterans, with Black Lives Matter activists, with union groups; he visited convention centers and private homes. His companions became a roaming political family that shared duties ranging from passing out literature to feeding Barkan pizza, because he was starting to have difficulty lifting his arms.
“He’s the kind of person who makes you want to radically transform the world and makes you want to radically transform yourself because he’s such a good person,” said Tracy Corder, an Oakland, Calif., activist who had planned to accompany Barkan’s caravan for two weeks, but ended up still on the bus two months later. “Whether he’s at a veterans’ breakfast in Reno or a community meeting in Detroit he speaks the same way. He doesn’t play to the room.”
By the end of the summer, Barkan needed a wheelchair full time, and his voice was so weak that they had to buy him a strap-on microphone attached to an amplifier, so he could be heard.
No therapy can stop ALS’s relentless pace, though it varies from patient to patient. His doctors didn’t object to Barkan traveling because there is no proven way to slow the disease. Yet the long drives and all the talking took a toll, and when he returned home for a few weeks in late August, he was exhausted. “As soon as he got home it got much harder to understand him,” said King. “He had more trouble enunciating. It seemed like all the speechmaking on that trip had an impact.”
It was not as if Barkan and King had given up trying to fight his disease. They pursued expert advice, and in early 2017 even traveled to Japan to buy edaravone, a new ALS drug that hadn’t yet been approved in the U.S.
Friends from law school class ran a GoFundMe campaign to pay for a home health aide, raising $21,000 from 151 people in a few days. Some of the donors worked at big corporate firms, others for public interest concerns. His aide, Aiyana Sage, also ran Barkan’s Twitter account and answered his email. As time went on, two other home aides helped care for him during the week.
There just wasn’t much to be done. Barkan was seeing two neurologists, one a clinician, another involved in cutting-edge research. “Both of them are wonderful. And both of them are almost entirely useless to me,” he said. As for edaravone (which FDA approved in May 2017), “it doesn’t do anything as far as I can tell.”
As it is for many chronically ill Americans, fighting his own health insurer was part of Barkan’s struggle, one that he quite openly joined to his larger political struggle. HealthNet, which offered coverage through King’s job, initially refused to pay for a ventilator or for edaravone. After Barkan raised a fuss, it backed down, but he sued them anyway, in a class action filed in June.
“I did it because this is how they do business—deny, deny, delay, and then people give up,” Barkan said. “We want them to change their practices, and we also want to make the political case for single payer.”
HealthNet tried to get the lawsuit dismissed with forced arbitration, but in November, a judge ruled the case could go to trial.
In the end stages of ALS, a ventilator is required because the patient’s breathing muscles fail. In Japan, one study showed that 45 percent of ALS patients stay alive on ventilators; in the U.S. only 20 percent. That’s because being on a ventilator requires full-time nursing care to prevent infections, which are what kill ALS patients at that stage. Insurance doesn’t cover them, King explains, “so you have to decide whether to bankrupt your family or give up living longer. It’s another example of how broken our system is.”
***
On the morning of Thursday, Sept. 27, the day that Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh testified in the Senate Justice Committee, protesters gathered around the Calder statue in the Hart building to put Barkan’s confrontational strategy to a test—chanting, marching and shouting questions at visibly uncomfortable senators. (More than 300 people would end up being arrested by D.C. and Capitol police, on charges that included “incommoding.”)
Barkan, who’d been arrested two days before, wore gray sweatpants and a black “Democracy” T-shirt, his intense blue eyes shining with determination, fingers on the controls of a $30,000 wheelchair (provided by insurance). He greeted old friends and strangers who had heard about Barkan or seen his YouTube videos and wanted to shake his hand.
As the hour approached 10 a.m., with Ford scheduled to begin testifying, Barkan needed an office in which to watch the proceedings. With a dozen colleagues in tow, he hurried down the hall, nodding to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s staff, pausing briefly before zipping around the corner and past the threshold of Ted Cruz’s office, 404 Russell.
“Can we watch the hearings here?” he asked the two office receptionists, Kendyl Willox and Elizabeth Castleberry. Without waiting for a response, he stopped his wheelchair in front of a TV set. The retinue followed, filling the anteroom’s chairs and couches as Ford was sworn in.
The group, about 14 strong by now, defiantly sprawled over the couches and chairs in the Senate waiting room, with its twin philodendrons, a bronze eagle and a Ronald Reagan biography over the fireplace. Cruz himself was nowhere to be seen, and Willox and Castleberry were not overjoyed to be hosting a touring contingent of progressive agitators. But after a few minutes in the back office they returned to offer snacks and beverages to the visitors—candy, bottled water, cherry Dr. Pepper.
As Ford parried the prosecutor’s questions, a family from Odessa, Texas, came by for a visit. Three women from Herd on the Hill, a progressive group, delivered 20 signatures from Texans opposed to Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Ross Dworkin, a specialty pharmacist, dropped in to lobby Cruz on a bill. As the hearing progressed, Barkan offered elated commentary. Ford was so genuine, he said. He was confident that her testimony had put the Republicans in an untenable position. Helen Brosnan of New York City, one of Ady’s Roadies, fed him Skittles.
***
By the time the campaign failed, with Flake, who had briefly ground the confirmation to a halt by calling for an FBI investigation of Ford’s claims, throwing his support to Kavanaugh, Barkan had returned home to King and Carl.
“I don’t know whether our Kavanaugh activism was helpful or harmful in the election,” Barkan would say later. “I do know it was the right thing to do. He is odious and we had a moral duty to try to stop him.”
Though he wasn’t persuaded, Flake was left with “a lot of respect” for Barkan, he says. “He’s very committed to what he was doing, and obviously this has not been easy for him, to travel and to speak out, given his condition. It speaks well of him.”
Month by month, ALS cripples the muscles of speech. The things Barkan says remain acute, but it becomes harder and harder to understand him, and the amplifier produces plangent sounds.
“I continue to decline rapidly,” he told me in a February message via email. He had had a feeding tube installed and could no longer take a single step. “My left hand is almost completely paralyzed. Worst of all, I’m now totally unintelligible to anyone but Rachael and Aiyana and even they usually have trouble.”
“It’s hard to watch him struggle to get the words out,” says Will Collins, a law school friend, now a D.C. public defender, who came by to visit with Barkan during the Kavanaugh protests. He was shaken by how difficult it was to understand Barkan, remembering the days when they organized NCAA Tournament brackets and played pickup basketball, and their legal clinic defended workers from wage theft. “He had so much to say, and he spoke in complete paragraphs.”
One of Barkan’s friends said that as he was losing his physical voice, he was gaining a larger one, as a kind of martyr for health care. But that, of course, was also poignant. “It’s hard for someone who knows how smart and dedicated he is to hear people talk over him, or ask me if they can take a picture with him,” says Smith.
In January he’d started using a technology called Eyegaze, which has laser beams that track a paralyzed patient’s eyes following lines on a screen, converting them into machine recordings that use the patient’s voice.
Barkan had begun “banking” his voice last year, when he still could. Now, he was using Eyegaze to write emails and to revise his memoir, “Eyes to the Wind,” set for publication in September. The technology was too slow for group conversation, or for “age-appropriately impatient Carl,” but “a thousand times better than nothing.”
“I was a champion debater in high school, and an award-winning thespian,” Barkan had told me. “Speaking is the one thing I did best. Losing my voice is by far the worst thing.”
He had recorded himself singing songs to Carl, who will turn 3 in May.
“We had ideas of this very long life together,” King told me, “having conversations around the dinner table and being very involved and present.”
The investment and passion that Barkan put into his activism had always drawn her, and it was still “wonderful to see him make meaning out of this horrible experience and to translate that into having impact on a lot of peoples’ lives.” But of course it was all a tradeoff. His looming fate, she says, “is very hard to deal with.” His prominence, and the success they feel he’s had as an organizer in part because of the disease, is “bittersweet for all of us.
“We’d trade the attention he’s getting for him not having ALS.”
County Armagh, Northern Ireland – The neglected carcass of an old customs building on the outskirts of the town of Newry, in an industrial area 20 minutes from the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, is covered in graffiti.
It has been more than 20 years since trucks stopped at the site to be inspected by British officials. The introduction of the European single market in 1993 eliminated the need for checks.
In the 1970s, the 17 posts like this were sometimes targeted by republican groups looking to unite the island as 30 years of conflict unfolded between mostly Catholic Irish nationalists and Protestant loyalists who wanted to be part of the United Kingdom.
The 1998 Good Friday Agreement marked an official end to The Troubles.
Most military infrastructure on the 500km-border was dismantled in later years.
Nearly 300 crossing points became simple roads for people to use daily.
An old customs post near Newry [Ylenia Gostoli/Al Jazeera]
That invisible line is set to become the only land border between the UK – which includes Northern Ireland – and the European Union – of which Ireland is a member – after Brexit.
“There has been a removal of the border in people’s minds as well. People don’t think of that border any more,” said Bernard Boyle, who runs an accounting company in the nearby town of Forkhill, a former nationalist stronghold.
On the long country road that leads out of the Northern Irish village through lush green fields, the only indication of leaving the UK is a traffic sign where the speed limit is written in kilometres instead of miles.
There is lots of talk that checkpoints will be a target for dissidents. And they will. But it goes further than that. The local people will not accept a border infrastructure.
Bernard Boyle, accountant and Northern Irish member of Border Communities Against Brexit
Boyle, 67, said that during the EU referendum campaign, “the idea of a border coming back had not been discussed, had not been thought about. It was only after the referendum that people began to highlight the possibility of a hard border.”
He is a member of Border Communities Against Brexit, a group comprising a mostly older, middle-class demographic from traditionally Protestant and Catholic communities.
The organisation includes small traders or farmers who operate across the two jurisdictions, whose businesses risk going under if a new tariff regime is introduced under World Trade Organization rules.
Fifty-six percent of Northern Ireland’s citizens voted to stay in the bloc in the June 2016 vote, with most in the southwest – which includes the border areas – choosing to remain.
A well-known mural in the Fountain [Ylenia Gostoli/Al Jazeera]
In Forkhill, several people hail from villages a few miles down the road, in the Republic of Ireland.
The bartender at the only local pub, for instance, crosses that invisible line every day.
Most people are weary of talking about Brexit and have no kind words for the politicians deciding their fate in Westminster.
There are concerns that the return of a hard border in the form of checks and physical infrastructure in areas like these could result in a return to violence.
Both the British government and the EU have said keeping the Irish border frictionless would remain a negotiating priority.
But discussions in the last few weeks have jammed over the “backstop”, the part of the withdrawal agreement that would keep Northern Ireland aligned to the EU’s customs and regulatory arrangements until a trade agreement is reached.
Citizens of Northern Ireland can choose to hold Irish, British or both passports according to the Good Friday Agreement [Ylenia Gostoli/Al Jazeera]
The backstop is seen by hardline Conservative MPs as a way of tying the UK to the EU’s rules indefinitely. In Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has opposed it with the argument that treating Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK is unacceptable.
“There is lots of talk that checkpoints will be a target for dissidents,” Boyle said. “And they will. But it goes further than that. The local people will not accept a border infrastructure.”
He remembers when locals rebuilt roads that had been cratered by the army during The Troubles out of security concerns.
“I remember the local people with machinery, and diggers and things coming down to fill it all in again, and the British army standing there with guns pointed at them,” he said.
There’s no place for a hard border, there’s no place for a border at all really … To even think about getting your passport out to go shopping or to see your grandparents is ridiculous.
Hollai Nic Conaill Oig, student
Fears of renewed violence were brought to the international spotlight by a car bomb on January 19 in Londonderry, also known as Derry, a city perched on a dramatic valley at the northernmost part of the border.
According to media reports, a group dubbed the New IRA claimed responsibility
Paramilitary groups are known to exist on both sides of the border, and local police were aware of the New IRA’s activities.
“The issue around Brexit is that it’s being used as a fear tactic to stir tension,” said Kyle Thompson, director of New Gate Arts and Culture Centre in Londonderry’s Fountain neighbourhood, a Protestant working-class enclave.
Hollai Nic Conaill Oig, a student at Ulster University, says there is ‘no place for a hard border’ [Ylenia Gostoli/Al Jazeera]
During The Troubles, many people fled Fountain, which is now home to fewer than 300 people.
The centre organises youth activities and a cultural festival with the aim, says Thompson, to “open up young people’s mind to define their own cultural identity”.
The hope is that this might have a knock-on effect in a place that has continued to be a sporadic flashpoint for violence in the city.
“Nobody knows exactly what a hard border might look like,” Kyle continued. “It’s a term that’s been created in order to [generate] fear in people to prevent the UK leaving the European Union.
“A border already exists: there’s two tax regimes, two different currencies. I think it’s a bit of a myth and of scaremongering to actually talk about any type of hard border until we work out a trade relationship,” he added.
A traffic sign indicating the speed limit in kilometres instead of miles is all that marks the border on a main road leading out of Forkhill [Ylenia Gostoli/Al Jazeera]
But how people feel about the border depends on how they feel about Brexit as a whole.
Nearby at Ulster University’s Magee campus, Hollai Nic Conaill Oig wishes she could have had a say in the referendum, but was younger than 18 when it took place.
“There’s no place for a hard border, there’s no place for a border at all really,” said the Irish language student, who grew up in the city.
Her grandmother and part of her family live in the village of Muff in County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland.
“It’s just five minutes down the road. To even think about getting your passport out to go shopping or to see your grandparents is ridiculous,” she added.
Hollai holds an Irish passport. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland residents can choose to hold an Irish or British passport, or both.
“People in the past worked really hard to get to where it is now,” she said.
Murals on the walls outside a youth club in the Fountain neighbourhood pay tribute to British soldiers who died in the First World War [Ylenia Gostoli/Al Jazeera]
“If the president cannot be indicted … as a matter of law, then the only way to hold the president accountable is for Congress to consider it and act, if warranted,” House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler said on “Fox News Sunday.” | Mark Wilson/Getty Images
House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler on Sunday called for special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to be released publicly along with any underlying evidence, arguing that doing less could be considered a “cover-up.”
Mueller did not drop new indictments as he wrapped up his nearly two-year-long probe, but Nadler said President Donald Trump might have been shielded from criminal indictments because of the office he holds. If that is the case, Nadler said, Congress will hold him accountable instead.
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“If the president cannot be indicted … as a matter of law, then the only way to hold the president accountable is for Congress to consider it and act, if warranted,” Nadler said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“Congress can only do that if it has the information,” he added. “For the department to take the position that ‘we’re not going to give information because he’s not indicted, like a normal person who’s not indicted because of lack of evidence,’ is equivalent to a cover-up and subverts the only ability to hold the president accountable.”
He also said it was possible that there had been abuses of power that did not technically constitute a crime.
On another interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Nadler said his committee would use subpoenas, if necessary, to continue gathering information, but he said they’d first try to negotiate.
“We’re already hearing the president may want to claim executive privilege for some of this, but the fact is he has no right to claim executive privilege on any evidence of wrongdoing,” he said.
But Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), the committee’s top Republican, said it would be more logical to assume, based on the lack of additional action recommended by Mueller, that nothing criminal had occurred.
“If Mr. Nadler is saying that our committee is supposed to be a paintbrush that just simply tries to taint the presidency and paint the presidency with doubt and innuendo then I would disagree with that,” said Collins, who was interviewed after Nadler on Fox. “That’s an abuse of power.”
Asked if it were possible that Mueller had not recommended indictments against Trump because he is the president, Collins said it’s not clear that is the reason.
“Probably what the facts showed was that there was no collusion,” he said. “Let’s go to the logical choice that nothing happened.”
Dora and the Lost City of Gold takes Nickelodeon’s titular explorer and treasure hunter into her high school years… and the real world.
The upcoming Dora movie casts off the series’ animated roots in favor of a live-action adventure starring Isabela Moner. This debut trailer offers an extended look at what’s to come, from Dora’s awkward first steps into her high school years to her next, great treasure hunt.
Dora and the Lost City of Gold hits theaters on Aug. 2.
Bangkok, Thailand – Voting has closed in the long-delayed elections that Prayuth Chan-ocha, the retired army general who led the coup against the country’s last elected government five years ago, hopes will return him to power as a civilian prime minister.
Polling stations across the country closed after nine hours of voting at 5pm (10:00 GMT).
About 52 million voters were registered to vote, some seven million of them for the first time.
The vote is taking place under a new constitution that gives the military considerable influence over the country’s civilian politics and makes it difficult for any party to win a majority in the 500-seat lower house. The upper house is appointed by the military.
The prime minister will be the person who secures a majority across both houses, and the 250-seat senate is seen as giving Prayuth an advantage.
With counting under way at the nearly 93,000 polling stations across the country, the Election Commission told reporters that the turnout was high. In early voting last week it was 87 percent.
At a polling station in the Jula hospital of Chulalongkorn University, election officials counted down the minutes to the closing of the polls and a few stragglers rushed to cast their ballots.
Nurse Pornsiri Supkong arrived in a puff with five minutes to spare. The 23-year-old said she had decided who to vote for after analysing party policies, but had also concluded that after so many years of division it was time for Thailand to try something new. “I looked back at the conflict and I thought I want to break from that,” whispering that she had decided to back Future Forward.
‘Beginning to see the future’
The vote count in the polling station, one of the 6,000 in Bangkok, showed others seemed to share her view with Future Forward performing strongly, and Prayuth’s Palang Pracharat in second place.
A few members of the public were on hand to watch the count.
“We are beginning to see the future,” said two students as they walked away.
Campaigning has been spirited and Pheu Thai, the party linked to the former prime minister and exiled tycoon, Thaksin Shinawatra, that has its power base in the rural northeast, is expected to win the most seats.
Other major parties include the Democrat, Thailand’s oldest political party, under Abhisit Vejjajiva.
Future Forward is a new party founded only last year by car parts billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit. It has campaigned on a promise of change and military reform.
In the sports hall of the Mater Dei School in central Bangkok, a steady stream of voters came to cast their ballot after the doors opened.
Phatcharin Ayasahond, 55, agreed the election was important, but her main concern was to preserve peace and stability.
The IT worker said she had been caught up in the violence on the streets of Bangkok in 2010 and did not want that kind of conflict to return.
“This election is very important,” she said after casting her vote. “This time it’s for us to decide who will be prime minister.”
She declined to reveal who she voted for.
‘Good people’
Thais are choosing their representatives through a complicated system that includes both direct votes and a party list, and while the official results will not be announced until after the coronation of King Vajiralongkorn in May, the Election Commission is expected to announce preliminary results hours after the polls close.
The king himself released an announcement on the eve of the election that was broadcast across national television to say that Thais should support “good people” to run the country.
“It’s significant that the king made a comment so close to election day,” said David Streckfuss, an independent historian based in Khon Kaen in the northeast.
“It’s hard to know exactly what the meaning is, but it shows the monarchy’s continuing interest in the country’s future trajectory.”
Thailand has been consumed by divisions between supporters and opponents of Thaksin since he was elected prime minister in 2001 promising to help ordinary people who had long felt ignored by the traditional elites in Bangkok.
Thaksin was overthrown in a coup in 2006 after mass street protests by the so-called “yellow shirts” and lives in exile after being found guilty of corruption. He says the charges were politically motivated.
The cycle of Thaksin-backed election win, instability and coup continued until Prayuth seized control of the country in 2014, banning political activity and cracking down on freedom of expression.
Despite the ban being lifted to allow election campaigning, parties and candidates continue to operate in a restrictive environment.
Thai Raksa Chart, another Thaksin-linked party, was banned and dissolved in February after nominating Princess Ubolratana, the king’s elder sister, as its candidate for prime minister.
Thanathorn faces court on Tuesday for criticising the military.
Parties need to secure 376 seats for a majority so it is possible for Palang Pracharat to form a government with only 126 seats in the lower house, assuming they have the support of the 250-seat upper house which is appointed by the military.
“This is a step along the way,” cautioned Thitinan Pongsudhirak of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. “There’s a long road ahead and we have to be mindful and sober. It’s not a genuine democracy. It’s a democratic transition under military custody.”
Every seltzer-chugging person has fantasized about their dream flavor.
Kate Rath brings those bubbly fantasies to life. The 31-year-old artist has been posting whimsical seltzer-inspired art on Instagram for the past several months. Using markers, watercolors, and a little bit of inspiration from Twitter, Rath makes all of her cans pop.
“I stopped drinking about a year ago and was pretty bored because I’d cut out my favorite hobby so I just started messing around with my new art supplies in my free time,” Rath tells Mashable via email.
She was originally inspired by another Instagram page, the now-defunct @chobani_flavors, an “unofficial parody” account showcasing Photoshopped Chobani yogurt cups with weird, non-yogurt flavors like “Broken Glass.” But since Rath didn’t know anything about Photoshop, she went the traditional route. “I just decided to start drawing fake seltzer flavors with my new supplies.”
It’s safe to assume Rath is a seltzer drinker herself. So much so that she scored herself an invite to an online community of other bubble-fanatics: The Secret Society of Seltzer. It’s a Facebook group called “Now Fizzing” and a digital space for people who just love seltzer water.
“Everyone on the group is super friendly, which is rare for the internet. There’s no attitudes there — just people supporting each other and posting pictures of seltzer that they’re drinking.” Rath credits some of her seltzer mania to the “Fizzers” she’s met in the carbonated realm. “It’s certainly contributed to my fanaticism.”
Rath’s healthy obsession translates well in her art. She has a knack for plucking obscure and niche cultural phenomenons from the current zeitgeist and painting them on to the familiar Polar Seltzer can, arguably a phenomenon itself.
Here’s one for “Wonderwall” by Oasis.
“I have a running list of ideas on a note on my phone. Sometimes I will pick something off of there or I’ll check Twitter to see if there’s anything trending that I could make a flavor out of. A lot of times I just have an a-ha moment and think ‘ooo that would be a good seltzer flavor’ and just sit down and do it right then and there,” Rath said.
This one captures Shen Yun, the epic Chinese dance-show-turned-meme, perfectly.
Niche but highly-relatable human tendencies can also be found in Rath’s work. Who hasn’t fallen ill to a combo meal of symptoms only to find themselves on WebMD, diagnosing themselves with a disease they definitely don’t have?
The can Rath uses as a template isn’t by mistake but by design, as Polar is her seltzer supplier of choice. “My favorite flavor is Blackberry Citron from their Winter Seasonals last year, specifically in a can (bottle just doesn’t taste as good!)”
If Rath could have any flavor though, it would be “world peace” or “student loan eradication.” Realistically, she’d like to see more herbal flavors on sparkling water displays. “How good would a sage seltzer taste?”
Today, seltzer sales continue to surge, proving its popularity in a more health conscious society. Rath is just glad to be in on the fizzy fun: “I didn’t think that it would be as well received as it is since it’s such a weird niche. I just hope people keep enjoying it! And that everyone stays friendly and supportive. And to someday have as many followers as a Kardashian.”
Rahmatullah emerged as a singer in Dhaka in the mid-1960s [Social media]
Shahnaz Rahmatullah, a renowned South Asian singer, popularly known as Shahnaz Begum, passed away in Bangladesh after suffering a heart attack.
The 67-year-old singer’s career spanned five decades and encompassed a number of genres, particularly national songs.
She had retired from professional singing about seven years ago and died at her Baridhara residence in the capital, Dhaka.
Rahmatullah emerged as a singer in Dhaka in the mid-1960s, beginning her career in radio at the age of 10. She sang many patriotic songs during the liberation war of the 1970s.
Bangladesh’s war with Pakistan was fought for independence from West Pakistan. East Pakistan, initially called East Bengal, believed that power was concentrated in West Pakistan.
The two sides went to war in March 1971 and nine months later the conflict ended with the secession of East Pakistan, which became the independent state of Bangladesh.
‘Voice of the nation’
In 1992, Rahmatullah was awarded the Ekushey Padak, the second highest civilian award in Bangladesh.
In 2006, Shahnaz’s four songs were ranked on BBC’s list of top 20 greatest Bengali songs of all time.
The first funeral prayers were held at the Park Mosque in Baridhara. She left behind the husband, a son and a daughter.
Tributes from Pakistan and Bangladesh poured in on social media remembering her as a “gifted singer” and the “voice of the nation”.
Christchurch, New Zealand – Tens of thousands of New Zealanders have turned out for a mass vigil in Christchurch to mourn the 50 Muslims killed in the city during an attack on two mosques last week.
Nearly 40,000 people – equalling about four-fifths of the entirety of New Zealand’s Muslim population – attended the emotion-laden ceremony on Saturday evening in Christchurch’s Hagley Park, according to local officials.
The city’s Al Noor and Linwood mosques were the two places of worship targeted in the March 15 attack, which marked the worst mass shooting in New Zealand’s history and was branded a “terrorist attack” by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
The mass killing has prompted an outpouring of grief on an almost unprecedented scale in the historically peaceful Pacific nation, with remembrance events and ceremonies held repeatedly across the country since it took place.
‘May your spirits go to Aoraki’
Saturday’s vigil for the victims of the massacre – believed to have been carried out by 28-year-old Australian born Brenton Tarrant – included speeches, singing and silence from representatives of the Muslim community, indigenous Maori and others.
It started with an Islamic prayer, recited by Linwood mosque Imam Alabi Lateef Zirullah, followed by the reading out of the names of the 50 worshippers killed on March 15. Many in the crowd wept as each victim, starting with 3-year-old Mucaad Ibrahim, was announced.
“These people came here as refugees and migrants,” a Maori speaker said afterwards.
“May your spirits go to the top of Aoraki … and look down on us and give us peace and love,” he added, using the traditional Maori name for Mount Cook, New Zealand’s highest peak.
More than 40 of the victims, many of whom had arrived in New Zealand seeking refuge from instability and conflict elsewhere in the world, were buried in Christchurch’s New Park Cemetery earlier this week.
Survivor praises New Zealand’s ‘unity’
Mustafa Boztas, a 21-year-old survivor of the shootings at Al Noor, said Saturday’s ceremony and other events in recent days showed “New Zealand cares” about it’s minority Muslim community, which accounts for just over one percent of the country’s nearly five million people.
Earlier on Saturday, more than 1,000 people marched in a rally against racism in Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city, carrying “migrant lives matter” and “refugees welcome here” placards.
The rally came a day after Ardern and some 20,000 other New Zealanders attended a Muslim prayer ceremony in Hagley Park, near the Al Noor mosque. Ardern, who has won widespread praise from Muslims and non-Muslims for her response to the mosque shootings, wore a headscarf and quoted the Prophet Muhammad.
Before the ceremony, two minutes of silence was held nationwide and the call to prayer was broadcast on national television and radio stations.
Many non-Muslim women have worn headscarves in recent days as a show of solidarity with New Zealand’s Muslim community [Edgar Su/Reuters]
“This shooting has united us together, as one,” Boztas, who is currently wheelchair-bound after being shot in his leg, told Al Jazeera from the front row of the vigil.
“It takes time to recover … [but] I’m glad to be here,” he added.
Fifty people were wounded in the March 15 attack, 24 of whom are still being treated in Christchurch hospital. Four people remain in critical condition, as does a four-year-old girl being treated in the North Island city of Auckland.
‘The world is watching what we do next’
Glenda Joy, whose Muslim boyfriend lost several friends in the March 15 attack, said life would “never be normal again” for those directly impacted by the shootings.
“The shock for him is wearing off and now he is just very quiet, he’s trying to process it and that is going to take a long time,” Joy, one of many non-Muslim women wearing a headscarf at Saturday’s vigil, told Al Jazeera.
She also said New Zealand needed greater “education” about Islam and called on the country to battle back “everyday racism” present in some pockets of society.
Though New Zealand is renowned for its perceived tolerance, experts have warned Muslims continue to face everyday racism, negative stereotyping, including in the media, and a lack of knowledge about their faith and its associated customs.
The country’s other minority communities, including the indigenous Maori population, also frequently report facing discrimination from parts of the majority-White population.
Sam Brosnahan, president of the New-Zealand based University of Canterbury’s student association, said New Zealanders needed to respond “long term” to the March 15 attack and use the wave of compassion it has unleashed across the country to put a permanent end to discrimination.
“The world has watched in wonder at how we have all responded,” he said.
“But the world is also watching what we do next, so let’s show them the Aotearoa the world needs,” he added, using the Maori name for New Zealand.
Ardern said on Sunday that a national remembrance service would be held on March 29 to honor the victims of the mosque killings.
“The service will be a chance to once again show that New Zealanders are compassionate, inclusive and diverse, and that we will protect those values,” she said in a statement.
‘Islamophobia kills’
Ardern and Muslim leaders have both called in recent days for the ending of racism and Islamophobia in New Zealand and across the globe.
Imam Gamal Fouda, prayer leader at the Al Noor mosque who was present during last week’s attack, told attendees at the ceremony in Christchurch on Friday that “Islamophobia kills” and the March 15 attacks had not “come overnight”.
“It [the attack] was the result of the anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim rhetoric of some political leaders, media agencies and others,” Fouda said.
“Last week’s event is proof and evidence to the entire world that terrorism has no colour, has no race, and has no religion,” he added.
“The rise of white supremacy and right-wing extremism is a great global threat to mankind and this must end now.”
Tarrant, a self-avowed white supremacist is scheduled to appear in court on April 5.
He was charged with one count of murder during an earlier hearing, on March 16, though police later admitted that the person in question had been wrongly declared dead.
He is expected to face more charges of murder during next month’s hearing, in which he is set to represent himself.
Kelly Craft’s GOP ties reach back to the George W. Bush administration, when she was a major fundraiser for Bush’s 2004 reelection. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
At least half of the GOP members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have received donations from Kelly Craft or her husband.
If Ambassador Kelly Craft ends up before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the ritual grilling of presidential nominees, she’ll be looking back at some of her favorite Republican senators.
Craft, whom President Donald Trump has said he’ll nominate to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, gave $5,400 to Marco Rubio’s primary and general election campaigns for his 2016 Senate race. She also donated the maximum allowed — $2,700 — to Sen. Todd Young’s and Sen. Ron Johnson’s respective general election campaigns that year.
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And that was all after she and her husband, coal magnate Joe Craft, had thrown their influential support behind Rubio’s presidential effort, only to become prolific fundraisers for now-President Donald Trump when the Florida Republican dropped out of the race.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee boasts five former presidential contenders and a handful of members on the Republican side of the dais who recently won competitive races.At least half of the GOP members of the panel, which would have to vet the current U.S. ambassador to Canada again should Trump officially nominate her, have received donations from Kelly or Joe Craft since the 2012 cycle, according to Federal Election Commission records reviewed by POLITICO. The review was limited to candidates’ campaign committees and leadership PACs.
While it’s not unusual for high-end donors to become ambassadors — President Barack Obama’s two ambassadors to Canada were major fundraisers for him— the direct link between the committee members voting on Craft’s nomination to one of the most important national security posts in government and her political donations is striking. Craft is one of the wealthiest and most well-connected political patrons in Kentucky; Joe Craft has given millions to Republican causes over the years.
Craft — whose father was a Democratic Party chairman for a Kentucky county—and her husband are well-known for their fundraising talents and their financial generosity to GOP candidates in past election cycles. They were Kentucky finance chairs of then-candidate Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, holding fundraisers in Lexington and Louisville.
Kelly Craft’s GOP ties reach back to the George W. Bush administration, when she was a major fundraiser for Bush’s 2004 reelection. Craft, who then went by Kelly Knight, was appointed in 2007 to be an alternate representative to the U.N. General Assembly. Her involvement in Republican politics grew from there, and she took on an influential role in backing Romney’s 2012 bid, said Scott Jennings, a former Bush administration official who is now a GOP adviser based in Kentucky.
If “there’s a big campaign, a) you want Kelly running your stuff in Kentucky and b) in terms of national players, they are some of the biggest,” Jennings said.
“She’s just somebody who knows how to meet people and make friends and bring people together, and I think that skill has been a hallmark of her career,” he added.
The couple has donated to the Republican campaign arms of the House and Senate, as well as to political action committees with higher contribution limits and to campaigns for other members of the Senate Republican Conference. But the disclosures show how the Crafts concentrated their donations on influential Republicans, oftentimes fighting tough races, who would later send Kelly Craft to Ottawa as the Trump administration’s representative to one of the country’s top trading partners.
To be sure, the Foreign Relations Committee features some new faces in the 116th Congress who didn’t weigh in on Craft’s previous confirmation as ambassador. Sens. Lindsey Graham, Romney and Ted Cruz, all past presidential candidates, replaced the now-retired Sens. Bob Corker, the former chairman, and Jeff Flake. Rubio and Rand Paul round out the list of 2016 contenders who sit on the committee.
The ambassador and Joe Craft each donated $5,000 — the maximum that cycle for primary and general elections combined — to Romney’s presidential campaign in 2011 and 2012. They also each gave to a joint fundraising committee or to PACs backing Romney in that election cycle.
Joe Craft also contributed $2,700 to Romney’s 2018 Senate bid. By October 2017, Kelly Craft was posted in Ottawa. While she is permitted under the Hatch Act to make political donations as a Senate-confirmed appointee, according to the Office of Special Counsel, she is not allowed to fundraise for candidates.
The Crafts were also big Rubio boosters, both during his presidential run in 2016 and his Senate race later that year. POLITICO did not find any documentation of contributions by the Crafts to Rubio’s presidential run, although they organized an exclusive event with the candidate and publicly committed their support in a crowded field.However, they each maxed out at $5,400 contributions toward his Senate campaign.
The Alliance Coal LLC PAC, which is affiliated with Joe Craft’s coal company, didn’t contribute to any 2016 presidential candidates, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. But the PAC, and Alliance Resource Partners employees and family members, have donated money that’s been funneled to Foreign Relations members including Sens. John Barrasso, Rob Portman and others.
POLITICO also did not locate any disclosures of contributions to Paul’s 2016 Senate campaign. The Crafts declined to back his presidential bid but had vowed to “strongly support” his re-election run.
A spokesperson for Kelly Craft declined to comment on her past support for Republican candidates.
The Crafts each gave the maximum to Johnson of Wisconsin and to Young of Indiana for their general election Senate contests during the 2016 cycle. Both men faced challenges from former Democratic senators — Russ Feingold and Evan Bayh — with cachet in their respective states.
The Crafts focused their dollars on reelecting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the 2014 cycle. McConnell sets the agenda in the chamber and will be integral to shepherding Craft’s nomination through, provided it’s formalized by the White House.
Kelly Craft maxed out her contributions to McConnell’s campaign for his primary and general elections, and both she and Joe Craft —they weren’t yet married— gave thousands to PACs and other committees geared toward boosting the Kentucky Republican.
They also each donated $2,600 toward committee member Sen. Cory Gardner’s 2014 general election race in Colorado against former Democratic Sen. Mark Udall; Gardner eked out a 2.5percentage-point victory.
While 2018 was a midterm cycle, which can mean an overall dip in campaign donations, Joe Craft’s donations had dwindled to a fraction of his previous largesse. Besides the Romney donation, Joe Craft also contributed $5,400 to Barrasso’s campaign and $5,000 to his leadership PAC, Common Values PAC.
The Wyoming Republican won reelection in 2018 with 67 percent of the vote.
![Rahmatullah emerged as a singer in Dhaka in the mid-1960s [Social media]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2019/3/24/b788d864c9d34f7a863da3ad766a0eba_18.jpg "Celebrated Bangladeshi singer Shahnaz Rahmatullah dies at 67")
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