A 104-year-old Chinese woman could live out her days behind razor wires in a notorious Austra-lian immigration detention center, her attorney said yesterday.
The Immigration Department has denied a visa to Hu Cuiyu, who came to Australia on a 12-month visitors visa in 1995 to see her adopted daughter Motoko Otani. Airlines denied her a ticket to return to her home in Xinjiang Province on the grounds that she was too old and frail for the rigors of airline travel.
Lawyer Julian Burnside said that after being declared an unlawful non-citizen, Hu could be taken into custody.
"If the department refused to issue her with a visa of any sort and it was not physically possible to take her out of the country, then presumably, the department would put her in a detention center and keep her there for the rest of her life," the prominent civil rights lawyer said.
Family friend Shep Chow told Australia's AAP news agency that Hu had adopted Otani during the Japanese occupation when she was a three-year-old orphan.
"She has got no children of her own, and her contemporaries and friends have all passed on, and the only family she has are in Australia," Chow said.
The case is another embarrassment for the Immigration Department, which revealed earlier this month that it had held a schizophrenic German woman in detention for 10 months, believing she was an asylum seeker.
Permanent resident Cornelia Rau, an air steward with the national airline Qantas until 2000, had lived in Australia for all but four of her 39 years and was listed as a missing person.
A coalition of civil rights groups on Tuesday asked a New York State judge to order one of its largest suburban counties to stop its deployment of nearly 600 license plate readers, calling it a warrantless and “indiscriminate surveillance system” that violates the state constitution. The class action lawsuit also alleged that Westchester County never got proper authorization to launch the program, which has amassed a database of 1.6 billion plate scans that has been shared with more than 50 outside law enforcement agencies. The complaint said the network “records the long-term travel patterns, daily habits, and intimate information of millions of
Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday blessed a giant new tower at Barcelona’s famed Sagrada Familia Basilica after celebrating mass inside what is now the world’s tallest church. A fireworks and light show illuminated the exterior of the temple at the end of the ceremony, bathing the unfinished basilica in shifting colours that highlighted its towering spires. A choir of 600 singers performed at the service which lasted around 90 minutes and was attended by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez as well as King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. The stained-glass windows in various colours shone brightly in between the tree-like
Voters in Switzerland yesterday cast their ballots on an initiative championed by the top right-wing party to cap the Alpine country’s population at 10 million. As of press time last night, early results showed that Swiss voters were leaning against it. The populist Swiss People’s Party, which has the most seats in parliament, has stirred up and fostered anti-migration sentiment over the years, notably about an influx of workers from the neighboring EU. Critics called the bid a self-inflicted wound, saying the boom in migration over the past generation has brought foreign labor and skills to sectors such as healthcare, finance, pharmaceuticals
Scientists have discovered communities of marine life — including jellyfish, tubeworms and brittle stars — thriving on a whale graveyard. The graveyards form when whale carcasses fall to the sea floor, becoming a sustaining snack for nearby critters. This one, which is up to 7km below the surface of the southeastern Indian Ocean, spans the largest area, and is so far the deepest found. A whale’s sheer size and the unique chemistry of its bones are the keys to forming these unique underwater neighborhoods, said Song Xikun (宋希坤), a biologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering
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