"Pompeo is not an appropriate choice for CIA director" - HRW Daily Brief

Two days after some 5 million people around the globe marched demanding respect for women’s rights, President Donald Trump reinstated the “Global Gag Rule,” a policy that prohibits United States international aid to groups which in anyway engage with abortion. The move poses a serious danger to women's rights and health around the world. Last year Human Rights Watch released a series of reports focusing on the difficulties that many Syrian refugee families face in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey when trying to access public education. Now, more than 40 percent of Syrian refugee children are still not going to school, as their parents struggle to find work. Refugee children deserve a chance at an education. And host countries should do more to help them. On Friday January 20, Ida Sawyer, Central Africa director at Human Rights Watch, was obliged to leave from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Immigration authorities in the eastern city of Goma annulled her visa and escorted her to the border. It was the second time in six months that Sawyer's work authorization was revoked. Indonesia's LGBT community remains under threat. Last week, police canceled a public sports and cultural event involving transgender people after a militant Islamist organization complained the event violated “religious values.” This is just the latest incident in which Indonesian police have openly collaborated with militant Islamists to unlawfully disrupt LGBT-related events and harass and intimidate LGBT people who attend them. From earlier today: It looks like Mike Pompeo could become the new CIA-director on Monday, despite concerns that he would use the agency’s surveillance and other powers in ways likely to violate rights on a broad scale. “Pompeo’s public disparagement of Muslims, taken together with his support for mass surveillance, reinforces concerns that he would not carry out his job as CIA director in a lawful and nondiscriminatory manner,” says HRW's Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno. “He is not an appropriate choice for CIA director.” Europe's far right leaders met in Koblenz, Germany, to discuss their warped idea of patriotism...