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At the opening of Jeanine Cumminss devastating and timely novel, bookshop owner Lydia and her eight-year-old son, Luca, are the only survivors of a targeted massacre by the Mexican cartel that dominates and terrorises their home town of Acapulco. Sixteen of their relatives have been shot at a family barbecue, including Lydias husband and Lucas father, a journalist who had been investigating and reporting on the drug traffickers.

What follows is the story of a mothers desperate attempts to keep her son alive, away from the cartel whose influence stretches across Mexico and from whom she knows they will never be safe. It is through their ordeal that Cummins humanises the migrant crisis, delivering a powerful portrayal of the extraordinary lengths people will go to in order to save their loved ones. It is a moving portrait of maternal love and an unflinching description of the experiences of wretched, displaced people on the move.

Lydia and Lucas journey towards the US border is perilous and terrifying. More than once, Lydia has to run alongside a high-speed train with Luca at her side, scrambling on board with their backpack as it hurtles along. Cummins does not hold back in describing the fate of those who do not time their jump successfully.

Along the way there is hunger, cold and the cruelty and occasionally kindness of strangers, while the gnawing terror of discovery by their murderous pursuers is ever present. During the journey, they meet and befriend other migrants, each with their own harrowing story about their need to escape. Two teenage sisters fleeing sexual exploitation are particularly affecting, the brutality of their experiences juxtaposed against their fiercely protective sibling bond.

It is this contrast familial love against external atrocities that gives the novel its immediacy and power. Small details as when Lydia risks losing the rest of their group in order to put a plaster on Lucas blister are quietly heartwrenching.

What Cummins does so skilfully in the novel is to subvert popular preconceptions about migrants. Lydia is educated, middle-class, escaping to America not in search of better economic opportunities but simply to survive. She and Luca are actual migrants All her life shes pitied those poor people. Shes donated money. Shes wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite, how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they came from, that this is the better option.

Cummins answers this question so compellingly that it is hard to imagine there will be a more urgent or politically relevant novel this year.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is published by Headline (14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over 15

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American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins review panic and pathos on the run from the cartel - The Guardian

Invoking the deaths of migrant children in Border Patrol custody and proclaiming solidarity with health care providers, freshman Rep. Lauren Underwood, Democrat of Illinois, urged her House colleagues in late September to vote for a measure that she said would help with a public health emergency at the border. The humanitarian and medical situation on our southern border has reached crisis levels, Underwood said.

She named 16-year-oldCarlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez, who, last May, was diagnosed by a nurse practitioner in a crowded Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, with the flu and a 103-degree fever. While the nurse flagged his condition to agents, Carlos received no further medical attention. The next morning, after an agonizing night, Carlos was dead, one of at least seven children to die in Border Patrol custody in the past year.

In her speech on the House floor, Underwood noted that medical care for these children has huge, unacceptable gaps. And since Carloss death, at least another seven adults have died in U.S. immigration detention centers.

Yet the bill that Underwood was pushing would not actually obligate any improvements in medical care. Instead, it would create a mammoth health and biometric database accessible to immigration agencies known to create false records that the government later uses against migrants, who are unable to challenge or even see these tainted reports in asylum and other immigration proceedings. Agencies also use migrants personal information to track them down for deportation.

Underwoods bill, the U.S. Border Patrol Medical Standards Screening Act, currently under consideration in the Senate Judiciary Committee, directs Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, to create an electronic health record system accessible to all agencies working in immigration enforcement. The bill does not specify what personal information would be collected and shared. It does not mandate improved care, better oversight of abusive or negligent officers, nor alleviate the unsanitary and dangerous conditions in detention centers. Instead, it authorizes interrogations at the border by federal agents seeking biometric and narrative data under the expansive health rubric.

It is opposed by the Department of Homeland Security and by immigrant rights groups. The only obvious beneficiaries of the proposed database would be whichever technology firms get the contracts to build and maintain it.

In fact, U.S. agencies are already digitally storing all sorts of migrant data, including medical information. In response to questions from The Intercept, a CBP spokesperson saidthe agency is currently developing an electronic health record system to facilitate the collection, retention, review and exchange of medical data. This would seem to refer to data collected by health-care professionals treating people, far more restricted than Underwoods mandate for CBP to collect the health data of all migrants.

Immigrant rights advocates see health data as yet another piece of a digital surveillance dragnet.

Immigrant rights advocates see health data as yet another piece of a digital surveillance dragnet. In a 2018 report, the immigrant advocacy group Mijente wrote that U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is seeking to organize mass personal information for surveilling, arresting and deporting immigrants. The report explains howthe Department of Homeland Securityis developing a new cloud-based biometric system and relying on private tech companies storage capacity and expertise to more efficiently track and target immigrants. A recent Intercept article similarly highlighted how ICE scours a vast network of databases to target immigrants.Homeland Security agencies, working in concert with private corporations, already share biometric and other personal information with at least seven different companies, including Amazon, Google, IBM, Lockheed, Microsoft, Palantir, and Salesforce.

The backstory to Underwoods bill raises other red flags. It was drafted by Underwood herself, seemingly without the support or even knowledge of prominent immigrant rights attorneys and organizations, and with no experts testifying on it in a committee hearing. One staffer familiar with the bill was overheard on speakerphone, as The Intercept was interviewing a colleague, saying Underwood wrote it at the suggestion of a contractor. Underwoods spokesperson denied this and claims she came up with the idea herself while on a Congressional delegation visit to the border.

The bill has also never been properly budgeted, despite a potential price tagin the billions. House rules require a budget analysis for each bill, but that never happened with the CBP legislation. Instead, the House Committee on Homeland Security, where Underwood introduced the bill, used the budget analysis for an unrelated 2002 bill, over objections from Republicans. The billbreezed through the House with no discussion of privacy or civil rights concerns.

Underwood claimed that health officials at the border, including officials from Homeland Security, had told her that one of the most urgent solutions they need is an electronic health record that can be used by everyone providing medical care at the border. But Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Al., disputed this, saying on the floor thatHomeland Security had issued an announcement that they oppose this piece of legislation. A House staffer stated that Underwoods claim thatHomeland Security supported her bill came from an individual she met on a border trip who allegedly said it would be easy and cheap to implement an interoperable health records system. It was never made clear to me if that person was a DHS employee, contractor, or a medical volunteer.

At the same time, the House has passed two other bills: the Humanitarian Standards for Individuals in Customs and Border Protection Custody Actintroduced by Democrat Rep. Raul Ruiz of California, and the Homeland Security Improvement Act introduced by Democrat Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas. Both were written in collaboration with immigrant-rights groups. They mandate screening and treatment of those in CBP custody by a licensed medical professional, an oversight panel, review of ICE and CBPs compliance with standards of care, as well as yearly evaluations. Ruiz, who has worked as an emergency physician, told The Intercept, I wrote this public health-focused bill to help ensure that people in the custody of the U.S. government are treated humanely and that children arent dying while in the custody and responsibility of CBP.

Ruizs bill has been endorsed by 14 medical groups, while the American Civil Liberties Union has praised Escobars bill, saying it would provide meaningful accountability. No such endorsements or plaudits have been publicly expressed about Underwoods bill.Asked by The Intercept to name a single group that supported her bill, Underwoods staff requested time to consult a colleague, but produced no names and did not respond to a follow-up email.

Male minors rest under Mylar blankets in the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center in McAllen, Texas, on Aug. 12, 2019.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Public health studies have shown that electronic health records do not improve health outcomes, including for diabetes, HIV emergency room screening, and surgery. Carlos Hernandez Vasquez and at least two other childrenlastyear, for example, were diagnosed with the flu and subsequently died, even though Border Patrol already knew of their medical problems. The underlying problem is holding children in jails and not adhering to even the substandard protocols of Border Patrol facilities. An internal government report, published just days after Underwoods bill was first introduced, highlighted dangerous overcrowding and prolonged detention in cells where Border Patrol failed to provide people with sufficient food, showers, or flushing toilets. The report noted that some adults were kept in standing-room-only cells for up to a month.

Underwood invoked these horrors as her bills rationale, but a billion-dollar database will not fix such conditions, and experts worry that it could make things worse for migrants. Jacinta Gonzalez, field director of Mijente, said the bill was expanding powers of surveillance for DHS, an agency that has proven time and time again to not be able to follow constitutional rules, much less protect human and civil rights. She saw the database as basically setting up a system of coercion without enough information or consent about what is going to happen with your personal information.

Immigration agents could use information obtained under duress at first contact with the Border Patrol to later track down migrants, share it with regimes from which the migrants are fleeing, or argue that certain details inaccurately entered or mischaracterized later contradict information on an asylum claim or other immigration proceeding. Such conflicting information could be devastating to assessments of credibility by immigration judges, who tend to defer to official U.S. government information, even when it is often shown to be inaccurate.

The Washington Post recently reported on ICE agents potentially screening biometric data from adults seeking to claim migrant children from government custody. The plan, developed by White House immigration adviser Stephen Miller, would have ICE use that data to make arrests and deport people, an order that clearly contravenes laws restricting the use of refugee programs for immigration enforcement. CBP cloud info is clearly not safe, or not being used as intended, Gonzalez said.

CBP cloud info is clearly not safe, or not being used as intended.

Paromita Shah, executive director of Just Futures Law, said thatUnderwoods bill sounds innocuous on paper, that the data is objective and untainted. But data is political, and data is valuable. Shah noted that this kind of data is never given to the person it belongs to. They dont have access or power over it.

There is already precedent for immigration authorities relying on biometric databases to make immigration decisions based on flawed entries, or otherwise misusing personal diagnostic data. Take the Biometric Identification Transnational Migration Alert Program, or BITMAP, which since 2016 has been sucking in data from children who have crossed paths with immigration authorities outside of the United States. Often that data collected from, say, unaccompanied Bangladeshi teenagers in migrant camps in Ecuador or Panama is unreliable, based on bogus passports or other misinformation. Yet ICE has used it to declare such teenagers adults and deny them protections afforded to child migrants. In one case of a child seeking asylum and challenging ICEs use of bad information shared across the BITMAP system, federal Judge Diane Humetewa in 2018 ruled against ICE, declaring that these records appear to be questionable at best.

In another example, the Deportation Research Clinic at Northwestern (run by Jacqueline Stevens, one of the authors of this piece) has obtained documents showing agencies regularly using scientifically unsound age assessments based on X-rays of third molars obtained without consent and in violation of the law and orders by several federal judges. The governments reliance on databases reduces people and their stories into data that is inaccessible to the individual and almost impossible to dispute. Shah, of Just Futures Law, said that these databases are rarely about truth trading. Data collection is often a push to a certain conclusion.

Rep. Lauren Underwood speaks to members of the press ahead of the State of the Union address in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives on Feb. 5, 2019, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Zach Gibson/Getty Images

Underwood frequently presents herself as a hard-working medical care provider, even appearing in a campaign ad in scrubs. The phrase as a nurse regularly peppers her speeches, as was the case when she pitched her database bill on the House floor, a riff her colleagues echoed. As a nurse, as a trained nurse, I appreciated the astuteness in which she looked at this, said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, as she rose to support the bill.

Although Underwood obtained degrees and certificates in nursing and public health, she has never been paid to care for patients. During her seven years in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, she worked on health insurance, a job that included meeting with corporations seeking advantageous terms for Medicaid reimbursements. After leaving her position with the government, she went to work for an Illinois Medicaid managed care firm as senior director for strategic and regulatory affairs, jargon that typically means lobbyist, although she did not register as such.

The firm employing Underwood, NextLevel Health, has been the subject of an investigation into why Illinois was directing Medicaid recipients to the company at a rate incommensurate with its size and official ratings. The state of Illinois persistently gives NextLevel its lowest marksand NextLevel has also been fined for improper record keeping. Underwooddid not respond to questions about whether she communicated with Illinois state officials which would define her as a lobbyist and about salary discrepancies in her financial disclosure to the House about her work for NextLevel.

Underwood, endorsed by President Barack Obama, whose friends run NextLevel, benefitted as he did from the Illinois machine and raised money from ordinary people who thought she worked in scrubs, as well as from the Pritzker family and other billionaires, including over $1.6 million from Michael Bloomberg. The $325,000 that Underwood raised for the 2018 primary was about double that of her closest rival and more than the combined receipts of her four Democratic opponents. All told, Underwood raised almost $5 million more than twice the funds of the incumbent Republican.

That business-friendly posture may have been why House leadership named Underwood vice chair of the Committee on Homeland Security in 2019, despite her campaigns focus on health policy.

When Republicans were in the House majority, several Democrats on the committee had voted against government surveillance programs, including ranking member, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who has challenged the BITMAP database. In his dissent to a bill that, had it passed, would have elevated aHomeland Securityprogram into law, Thompson noted, Basic questions about the program remain unanswered. How are international partners selected? After checks against databases, what does the U.S. government do with the vast majority of records it collects on migrants?

Thompsons seniority put him in line for his current position as the committees chair, but a less skeptical vice chair like Underwood would seem to benefit the companies and major donors angling for expensive contracts for surveillance database programs.

One of those corporations is General Dynamics, the worlds sixth largest military contractor and the federal governments secondlargest supplier of information technology services. General Dynamics Information Technology handles juvenile case management services for the Office of Refugee Resettlement. In 2018, thecompany spent $9 billion to buy CSRA, the firm that contracts withHomeland Security to operate BITMAP.

The day before Underwood pushed her CBP health database bill through the Homeland Security Committee, General Dynamics kicked $60,000 into the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, which is controlled by Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, a former corporate health care executive and Underwood booster. General Dynamics also paid lobbyists almost $8 million over the first nine months of 2019. Thecompany disclosed that in the timeframe Underwood was introducing the CBP bill,General Dynamics soughtto influence funding and issues related to Cyber programs; information systems; telecommunications; technology equipment; infrastructure; support and services; border security technologies; data centers, indicating CBP among their target customers.

Underwood did not respond to requests for comment about her relationship with General Dynamics and other major corporations who may stand to benefit from the introduction of new medical databases. In 2018, shortly after digitally submitting inaccurate financial data to the House Clerk, Underwood told a journalist, A representative is supposed to be transparent, accessible, and honest.

More here:
A Massive Migrant Health Database That No One Wants - The Intercept

Three deeply intertwined stories that drove political and social change this decade, and in time may come to define European political history of the 2010s terrorism, Brexit, and the migrant crisis.

The most politically turbulent decade for Europe since the end of the Cold War is drawing to a close but what will these ten years be remembered for?

It has certainly been a difficult time, if not the most difficult yet, for the European Union. The early years of the decade were dominated by the Unions enforced policy of ultra-austerity on its southern members, particularly Greece. Suspicion at the disregard the Union appeared to treat the citizens of some nations with after Greece was later reinforced when the European Union installed its own technocratic government in Italy in 2011, after the government of the day hadnt played by Brussels rules.

Following the collapse of the elected government of Silvio Berlusconi, Brussels made a former European Commissioner the Italian Prime Minister, creating the first of three EU-backed technocratic Italian governments. These moves and others continue to linger in the minds of Eurosceptics across the continent years later.

Yet perhaps even greater developments may colour memories of the decade the deadly terror attacks striking against European cities and peoples, the decision of one European politician to unilaterally declare the continent open to mass migration, and the all-consuming debate on Britains withdrawal that hasnt even happened yet.

As we enter a new decade, events that define the last:

The Migrant Crisis

RIGONCE, SLOVENIA OCTOBER 23: Migrants are escorted through fields by police as they are walked from the village of Rigonce to Brezice refugee camp on October 23, 2015 in Rigonce,, Slovenia. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Future historians may well remember the 2010s ironically as the Wir schaffen das or we can do it decade. This phrase, uttered by Germanys Angela Merkel in 2015 was in response to criticism that already prodigiously generous Germany not doing enough to help migrants.

That, and the expressions of Germanys so-called Welcome-culture were interpreted as an open invitation by many so many, in fact, that over a million illegal migrants and refugees are known to have crossed into Europe in just one year, with over 800,000 of them crossing into the continent by sea.

Germany opened her borders to all comers in 2015, de facto throwing the borders of Europe open unilaterally, and in doing so triggered the Europe Migrant Crisis. The summers news was of the enormous suffering caused by Angela Merkels carelessness the thousands killed on unseaworthy boats sent by ruthless human-traffickers making the most of her largess to make quick money and of great columns of people marching north.

While in a sane world the migrant crisis shouldnt have been possible, a combination of factors including the European Unions much-vaunted but now discredited open borders scheme and Germany suspending the EU laws which were designed to prevent migrants crossing the continent looking for the most generous country rather than the first safe one, meant it was.

At times, the through-flow of migrants heading north through the Balkan route and central Europe was so great the number of illegals being waved through national borders was tens of thousands every single day.

While some countries opened their borders, others resisted being co-opted into Germanys mass migration scheme. Hungary, one of the last stops on the way north and a key road and rail hub for illegals heading to Germany saw up to 10,000 migrants a day in mid-2015, but the completion of their southern border fence in October of that year saw daily arrivals suddenly fall to pre-crisis levels, more or less overnight.

Registered, known illegal immigration to Hungary fell from 391,000 in 2015 to just 1,184 in 2017.

As the left in Europe mourns the end of a decade which saw the collapse of their political movements and the rise of the populist right across Europe, it is worth noting far-sighted left-politicians foresaw what damage to their own credibility the migrant crisis would do. European Commission vice president Frans Timmermans who isstill in post and these days delights in meddling with the Brexit process warned in 2015 that unless the establishment could find sustainable solutions to the migrant crisis, there would be a surge of right-wing populism across Europe.

Terrorism

TOPSHOT Authorites inspect a truck that had sped into a Christmas market in Berlin, on December 19, 2016, killing at least nine people and injuring dozens more.Ambulances and heavily armed officers rushed to the area after the driver drove up the pavement of the market in a square popular with tourists, in scenes reminiscent of the deadly truck attack in the French city of Nice last July. / AFP / Odd ANDERSEN (Photo credit should read ODD ANDERSEN/AFP via Getty Images)

The 2010s for Europe was a decade pock-marked by the horror of radical Islamist terror, with a large number of high-profile, high-casualty attacks visited upon its cities and people, and dozens more intercepted by the security services before they could come to fruition.

Indeed, the decade began with an attempted attack fortunately for its intended target, failed on January 1st 2010, when a Somali migrant armed with an axe tried to kill Danish artist Kurt Westergaard in his home. The motivation for the attack is one now all too familiar in Europe Mr Westergaard had drawn a cartoon of the Islamic prophet Mohammed.

Later, nearly the entire editorial magazine of a French satirical magazine were gunned down in their own offices during a weekly meeting. Again, their crime had been to be undiscriminating in their lampooning, having made as much fun of Mohamed as of any other prophet or god. The vast majority of European mainstream media outlets chose to be cowed by the attacks rather than stand in solidarity with the dead, refusing to publish the images the men and women of Charlie Hebdo had been murdered for.

More attacks followed, and at an accelerating pace as the decade wore on. 2013 introduced Europe to a new kind of terror when a pair of Islamist converts rammed their car into a soldier on a London street and attempted to decapitate him with kitchen knives. While the name of Drummer Lee Rigby lives on, the car-knife attack became the weapon of choice for Islamist killers this decade and is now better known to ordinary people across Europe. Requiring no complex planning or acquiring illegal weapons or explosives, the method was promoted by the Islamic State themselves as ideal for killing the unbelievers.

While many terror attacks against Europe were perpetrated by so-called homegrown radicals arguably a product of the doctrine of multiculturalism encouraging balkanised communities going their own way, rather than pulling together and integrating into national cultures this has not always been the case. The gunman at the 2014 Jewish Museum attack had fought in the Syrian civil war before coming to Europe, and some of the attackers in the 2015 Bataclan massacre in which 131 were killed with Yugoslavian AK47-clones and explosives had also fought in Syria, thought to have entered Europe while posing as refugees during the migrant crisis.

Taking the automobile method to its logical conclusion, 2016 saw two truck attacks, using the largest and deadliest vehicles on the road to kill the largest number of Europeans. In the French city of Nice on their national day, a Tunisian migrant drove a rented 19-ton truck into crowds enjoying a seafront promenade party. Driving at over 50 miles an hour, 86 were killed.

This was followed up months later when a failed asylum seeker who too had come to Europe on a migrant boat murdered the Polish driver of a semi-truck and used the hijacked vehicle to drive through the Berlin Christmas market, killing 11.

The late part of the decade also saw a string of attacks in the United Kingdom. There was a vehicle-knife attack in Westminster in March 2017 which culminated in a police officer being stabbed to death inside the British Parliaments own walls, and the Manchester arena bombing which targeted children and their parents as they left an Ariana Grande concert which killed 22 and injured over 800.

Then London was revisited with another vehicle-knife attack at London Bridge later that year, where eight died. The scene would be targeted a second time in 2019 with yet another attack as a recently released extremist went on a knife rampage before being subdued by members of the public armed with improvised weapons.

The routine responses to these attacks has, too, become part of the grim background of European urban life in the 2010s the inevitable Love [insert city name] posters, teddy bears and tealights. Anti-terrorism barriers and police officers dressed like military special forces are now an apparently permanent feature of our streets. But as London mayor Sadiq Khan likes to point out, its all part and parcel of living in a big city.

Brexit

WESTERHAM, ENGLAND JUNE 23: Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP and Vote Leave campaigner holds up the Daily Express as he returns to his home after buying newspapers of the United Kingdom on June 23, 2016 in Westerham, England. The United Kingdom is going to the polls to decide whether or not the country wishes to remain within the European Union. (Photo by Mary Turner/Getty Images)

If the 2010s were the Brexit decade, then Nigel Farage must have been the man of the decade. What other individual can claim to have had such a profound and widely felt impact on the whole continent in the past ten years quite apart from how it has utterly dominated British politics, Brexit has near totally paralysed the European Union itself.

Every major European summit for years has been consumed by Brexit discussion, repeated Brexit deadlines and the false sense of urgency that always accompanies the down-to-the-wire negotiations Brussels runs on have run roughshod over every other concern. Most frustrated by this has clearly been Frances Emmanuel Macron, who clearly saw his domestic rise to power as an insignificant stepping stone on his mission to totally reform Europe.

Hence his being by far the keenest European leader to get Britain out of Europeas soon as possible if his poll ratings are anything to go by his time as French president are numbered and with that his chance to make his mark on history. This is all great news for the actual people of Europe, of course, who might take the view the less Eurocrats in Brussels are capable of actually doing the happier and easier their day to day lives can be.

Brexit itself had been on the slow-boil for decades, the nascent Eurosceptic movement having all but vanished in 1973 after the county voted to stay in the European community on the basis of a pack of half-truths from then Prime-Minister Ted Heath who withheld the truth he knew about the future direction of Europe getting a kick-start with the Maastricht treaty in 1992. Signing the European Union into existence, the push by the British government to support the move and take the country into ever-closer union with Europe all but split the Conservative party.

Nigel Farage then an unknown was one of many to leave the Conservatives at the time over their direction on Europe. A founding member of the UK Independence Party in 1993, Mr Farage has been a persistent character of this decade, having come to national attention after suffering a broken sternum, broken ribs, and punctured lung in an air-crash on the morning of the 2010 general election.

While all will remember the 2016 referendum, 2014 was the year Britains fortunes turned with respect to the European Union. In the European Union parliament elections of that year, UKIP became the first party other than Labour or the Conservatives to win a national election in over a century, setting alarm bells ringing among the establishment parties in Westminster.

Desperate to not have his leadership torn apart by the European issue as it has John Majors in 1992, then Prime Minister David Cameron promised an in-out referendum on Britains membership of the European Union as a means to appease Eurosceptics in the 2015 general election. This was an easy promise for Mr Cameron to make neither he nor the pollsters expected him to win the vote outright, and another coalition government would give him ample opportunity to renege on the pledge.

Yet he romped home with 24 more seats, so Mr Cameron gave Britain the referendum hed promised. Again an easy decision for him the Prime Minister, all his colleagues, the people they socialised with, other world leaders, and the pollsters all believed hed easily win the vote, and in doing so would put the issue of Europe to bed for another generation. To make the gamble a sure one, the government threw its full weight behind the remain side, wrote to every household in the country explaining why the European Union is a good thing, and indulged in what was then called project fear.

Well, we know how that went. Yet almost four years later the United Kingdom still hasnt left the European Union but seems all but certain to do so and new Prime Minister Boris Johnson is promising a decade of growth, prosperity and Brexit.

Happy new year!

The rest is here:
Terrorism, Brexit, and the Migrant Crisis: Three Stories That Defined the Decade - Breitbart

AS we turn over a new page for 2020, what will you be reading?

Could it be the hugely anticipated Hilary Mantel or the latest from Anne Enright? The latest contemporary tales from Marian Keyes or Colum McCanns new novel, which was inspired by true events?

Whatever you fancy, there will be plenty to keep book clubs busy and create a bestselling buzz.

Waterstones fiction buyer Bea Carvalho predicts the biggest book for 2020 is likely to be The Mirror And The Light by Hilary Mantel (Mar 5, 4th Estate), the conclusion to her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. The first two, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012 and Carvalho reckons this one may well be up for another award.

Its already pre-ordering really well and we will launch it with all the fanfare we did for The Testaments in 2019, she says.

In terms of big brand orders, we have a new book from Marian Keyes called Grown Ups (Feb 6, Michael Joseph), which will be our lead mass market title.

In her latest novel, she turns her attention to the issue of what it means to be a grown up in the modern world, and explores what happens when people just dont behave like them, starting with a family birthday party in which a single careless remark leads to the spilling of further secrets.

New literary fiction will include Utopia Avenue (Jun 2, Sceptre) from Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell.

Its a look at the music scene in Sixties Soho. Its his first new title in a while, which is very exciting, says Carvalho.

Other lead titles will include Apeirogon by Colum McCann (Feb 26, Bloomsbury), a novel inspired by a true story about two men - one Israeli and one Palestinian - who both lost daughters in the conflict and who form an unexpected friendship.

Elsewhere, there are new literary fiction titles from Anne Enright (Actress, Feb 20, Jonathan Cape), Anne Tyler (Redhead By The Side Of The Road, Chatto & Windus, Apr 9) and Rose Tremain (Islands Of Mercy, May 28, Chatto & Windus).

Look out for a new title called A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry (Mar 19, Faber & Faber), a spin-off from one of his previous bestsellers, she recommends.

Theres no slowing down in the popularity of crime fiction and 2020 will be no exception, with a new book from Jeffery Deaver, The Goodbye Man, his second in the Colter Shaw series (May 14, HarperCollins), in which the reward-seeker who helps police solve crimes travels to the wilderness of Washington State to investigate a mysterious cult.

Look out for You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (Mar 5, Macmillan), about a woman in dead end job, unfulfilled and looking for love who wants to belong. Then she meets two glamorous sisters who invite her into their circle and initially, life seems to get better. But they are not what they seem.

It follows the huge success of their previous thrillers The Wife Between Us and An Anonymous Girl.

In science fiction, theres the eighth in the bestselling Rivers of London series from Ben Aaronovitch, False Value (Feb 20, Gollancz), as well as House Of Earth And Blood (Mar 3, Bloomsbury), the first in a new Crescent City series by bestselling author Sarah J Mass. Its a modern fantasy set in a divided city which sees heroine Bryce Quinlan investigate her best friends murder, with help from an enslaved fallen angel.

A debut which is garnering great reviews in America is American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins (Jan 21, Tinder Press), an incredible book about the Mexican migrant crisis and the experience of making the journey from Mexico to the United States. We think this could be the launch of a really impressive career. It could be a huge word of mouth hit, says Carvalho.

The novel follows a mother and her young son as they flee across Mexico to escape the drug cartel which has murdered the rest of their family.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell (Mar 31, 4th Estate) is another American title that has already attracted a lot of attention, she adds. Its a disturbing tale about the grooming of a vulnerable 15-year-old girl by her English teacher.

Others we are excited about include The Mercies (Feb 6, Picador), a debut adult novel from Kiran Millwood Hargrave, who is a very successful author of childrens and young adult books.

Based on the real-life witch hunts of 1621, its set on a Nordic island where all the men have gone out to sea and died, and its about the community of women trying to face the elements.

Big books for autumn include a debut novel from award-winning journalist Dolly Alderton called Ghosts (Oct 15, Fig Tree), about a woman who becomes the victim of ghosting when she takes to online dating, while her father is vanishing into dementia and her friends are slipping away.

The author has a large profile on social media and co-hosts a successful podcast, The High Low, while her first non-fiction book, Everything I Know About Love, was a huge bestseller.

Caroline Sanderson, associate editor of trade publication The Bookseller, predicts sustainability and climate change are going to remain big themes in books for 2020.

Adult publishers have lagged a bit behind childrens publishers in terms of covering this for the ordinary person, but they are going to address it in 2020.

Our House Is On Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis by Malena and Beata Ernman, Svante and Greta Thunberg (Mar 5, Particular Books) is likely to fit the bill, says Sanderson.

Its co-written by climate crisis activist Greta Thunberg, her father, mother and sister. Being Greta Thunberg, it will be big, she predicts.

Ex-model Lily Cole is also bringing out a title in this genre called Who Cares Wins: Reasons For Optimism In Our Changing World (Jul 16, Penguin Life), a rousing call to action that will leave you feeling hopeful that we can make a difference, exploring issues from fashion to fast food and renewable energy.

It amazes me that 75 years on, memoirs of surviving the holocaust are still coming out, says Sanderson. One absolutely brilliant book is Hadley Freemans House Of Glass (Mar 5, Fourth Estate). Shes done a lot of detective work as to what happened to her family, so its about her grandmother and three brothers.

Dresden: The Fire And The Darkness by Sinclair McKay (Feb 6, Viking) is likely to be one of the bestselling titles for fans of Second World War history, Sanderson predicts, with the author bringing readers a balanced account of one of the most notorious and destructive raids in the history of aerial warfare.

The heavyweights going head-to-head this spring are Michael Cashman, whose memoir One Of Them (Feb 6, Bloomsbury) charts his life from Albert Square to the House of Lords, and John Bercow, whose autobiography Unspeakable (Feb 6, Weidenfeld & Nicolson), covers his story from childhood to parliament and the speakership.

Others to watch include How To Be Narstie by grime artist, TV presenter and internet personality Big Narstie (Mar 19, Ebury) who has penned this self-help guide to modern life, drawing from his own colourful life experiences, and Just Ignore Him (Sep 3, Little, Brown), comedian Alan Davies early memoir of growing up in the Seventies.

Then, there is What Makes Us Stronger by Freya Lewis (Feb 20, Seven Dials), the extraordinary story of how 14-year-old Freya survived the Manchester bombings, and the loving community that uplifted and supported her every step.

Originally posted here:
The must-reads in publishing for 2020 - Echo Live

ENGLAND'S Muslim population has smashed the three million mark in 2019.

Some parts of London are now almost 50 per cent Islamic, according to analysis from the Office for National Statistics.

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If current trends continue the areas could become majority Muslim within ten years.

Official ONS figures for 2018/19 that were released in December show that there are 3,194,791 Muslims living in England, with over a third aged under 16.

English Muslims make up the vast majority of the 3,363,210 currently living in England, Scotland and Wales. They make up 5.9 per cent of the 2018 English population (55.16 million).

2018 figures show that London was home to nearly 1.26 million Muslims, making up 14.2 per cent of the capital's population. 74 per cent of Londoners are listed as Christian or a-religious.

Following the migrant crisis that started in 2015, there were reports thatIslamic populations would triple by 2050as refugees headed west.

However the Islamic community in England is relatively low compared to other religions.

Christianity (all denominations) is still the most popular religion in England by a long shot, with 27.9 million people identifying with the church. 21.5 million of us don't identify with any religion at all.

The overall English population sampled by the 2019 ONS survey was 55,318,085. There were 63,783,693 Brits surveyed in all.

The Muslim Council of Britain has been approached for comment.

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Originally posted here:
Muslim population of England smashes three million mark for first time ever, figures reveal - The Sun