#ruffer

[pavel-nosok]

London wealth manager cashes out $1B profit from $600M BTC buy in November

London wealth manager cashes out $1B profit from $600M BTC buy in November

After profiting $1 billion in less than six months, Ruffer is open to making more Bitcoin trades in the future.

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[btcmanager]

Asset Management Firm Makes $1 Billion Profit by HODLing Bitcoin for 5 Months

Asset Management Firm Makes $1 Billion Profit by HODLing Bitcoin for 5 Months

U.K.-based investment management firm Ruffer made a quick buck HODLing bitcoin for five months. Ruffer Makes Quick Money on Bitcoin According to a report by The Times published on June 6, investment management company Ruffer is said to have made a whopping $1 billion in five months from investing in bitcoin. The firm added itRead More

https://btcmanager.com/asset-management-firm-1-billion-profit-bitcoin-5-months/?utm_source=Tumblr&utm_medium=socialpush&utm_campaign=SNAP

[thecryptoreport]

UK investment manager sells off half BTC holdings after $750M win

UK investment manager sells off half BTC holdings after $750M win

United Kingdom-based Ruffer Investment Management has made more than $750 million from its Bitcoin investment in less than two months, but it has decreased the size of its holdings. According to a report from British news outlet The Telegraph, Ruffer saw “immediate fireworks” after investing roughly 2.5% of its assets into Bitcoin (BTC) in November 2020, resulting in millions of dollars in gains…

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[hollyparkhouse]

In this weeks stitch workshop we did something quite interesting where we got to speed date with a sewing machine. How it worked was that each sewing machine had a new technique which we could learn and we were only allow 20 minutes at one sewing machine and when the time was up we moved on to the next one. I enjoyed this as it allowed me to learn loads of new technique in a short amount of time. And some I would definitely want to try again when working on up-cycling my denim jeans.

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cording foot

needle punch machine

3-way cording foot

wing needle

XR33

piping foot

ruffler

triple needle

janome 6600p- electronic sewing machine

pintuck foot

fringe foot

  Speed dating with a sewing machine In this weeks stitch workshop we did something quite interesting where we got to speed date with a sewing machine.

[rightsinexile]

Letter to the Editors: ‘Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, The US and Canada’

Dear editors,

I just finished reading Maria Cristina Garcia’s book ‘Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, The US and Canada’ (University of California Press, 2006). For someone like me who is involved in the current Central American crisis, but was not fully familiar with the history, this was a humbling read. It details the amazing work of advocates in the sanctuary movement, legal battles and the horrors at the border that we are seeing again today. And, it is especially helpful in that it details refugee and immigration policy not just in the US, but in Mexico and Canada. This book so much highlights the need for legal aid and the amazing work of legal advocates.

Galya Ruffer, J.D., Ph.D.

Director, International Studies Program

Director, Center for Forced Migration Studies

Northwestern University

[rightsinexile]

Publications & Resources

‘[W]omen and young girls face what the UN’s independent expert on human rights in Somalia refers to as “double victimization” — first the rape or sexual assault itself, then failure of the authorities to provide effective justice or medical and social support’ – Somalia: Women fearing gender-based harm / violence. UK Home Office. February 2015.‘The report aims to provide information on the security situation in Afghanistan, which is relevant for international protection status determination (PSD; refugee status and subsidiary protection)’ – EASO Country of Origin Information Report. Afghanistan Security Situation. European Asylum Support Office. January 2015. ‘This volume presents a comprehensive study of the relevance of experts, as mediators of culture, who are called upon to corroborate, substantiate credibility, and serve as translators in the face of confusing legal standards that require proof of new forms and reasons for persecution around the globe’ – Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status. The Role of Witness, Expertise, and Testimony. Benjamin N. Lawrence and Galya Ruffer (Eds). Cambridge University Press. February 2015.

‘The viewpoint that the humanitarian crisis constituted a national security threat… became an optical filter that bent normal principles of justice and fairness into a tiny void where a cynical governmental response formed: the women and children, regardless of the particular facts in their particular lives, must be deported for political purposes. Indeed, the Administration’s decision to deport them was made before any of the women sent to Artesia had been interviewed’ – Ending Artesia. Stephen Manning. Innovation Law Lab. 2015.

‘The victims are typically aged between 13 and 17, sent back home after being detained by immigration authorities for entering the country without authorisation’ – Deported children face deadly new dangers on return to Honduras. UNHCR. 29 January 2015.

‘Recent history has witnessed numerous humanitarian crises in which noncitizens have been among those most seriously affected. With more people than at any other point in history residing outside of their country of origin, the presence of new and sustained eruptions of violence and conflict, and the frequency and intensity of disasters predicted to increase, noncitizens will continue to be caught in countries experiencing crises’ – On the Margins: Noncitizens Caught in Countries Experiencing Violence, Conflict and Disaster. Sanjula Weerasinghe, Abbie Taylor et al. Journal on Migration and Human Security. 2015.

‘In order to address the deficiencies in the Greek asylum system, some of which were highlighted in the M.S.S. judgment, Greece has been implementing a complex reform of its asylum system, based on the Greek Action Plan for Migration Management and Asylum developed by the Greek authorities and supported by a number of actors, including the European Commission (EC), the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)’ – Greece as a Country of Asylum. UNHCR Observations on the Current Situation of Asylum in Greece. UNHCR. December 2014.

‘Inconsistent approaches in determining an asylum seeker’s complicity in smuggling undermine refugee protection for sea-borne asylum seekers’ – Smuggled migrant or migrant smuggler: Erosion of sea-borne asylum seekers’ access to refugee protection in Canada. Chelsea Bin Han. Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) Working Paper Series. February 2015.

‘This research constitutes a significant pooling of knowledge on the law and practice on alternatives to detention in 6 EU Member States (Austria, Belgium, Lithuania, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom). In addition, it includes legal research on the scope of Member States’ obligations to implement alternatives to immigration detention under international, European (i.e., Council of Europe) and EU law’ – Alternatives to Immigration and Asylum Detention in the EU: Time for Implementation. Philippe De Bruycker (ed.). Odysseus Network. January 2015.

‘A summary of the current minimum international legal standards on the right to legal aid, from the European Convention on Human Rights and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, supported by principles and standards from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee, the UN Principles and Guidelines on Access to Legal Aid in Criminal Justice Systems, and other European and UN bodies’ – European and International Standards on the Right to Legal Aid. Open Society Justice Initiative. December 2014.

‘This complex and multi-faceted human dilemma […] will only be solved when conditions in children’s countries of origin do not force them or their parents to migrate, when increased options exist for children and families to migrate through regular channels, and when policies at the regional, national, and local levels adhere to rights-based principles with the best interests of the child as a core standard and guaranteed access to international protection’ – Childhood and Migration in Central and North America: Causes, Policies, Practices and Challenges. Lisa Frydman, Karen Musalo, and Pablo Ceriani Cernadas (Eds.). Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, University of California Hastings College of the Law and the Migration and Asylum Program, Center for Justice and Human Rights, National University of Lanús, Argentina. February 2015.

‘The Tabit atrocities demonstrate the continuing and urgent need for a professional and independent force that can help protect civilian populations in Darfur from attack. It also underscores the reality that the current UNAMID force has been hamstrung in its performance and in the implementation of its core mandate’ – Mass Rape in Darfur: Sudanese Army Attacks Against Civilians in Tabit. Human Rights Watch. 11 February 2015.

‘Caseworkers must not stereotype the behaviour or characteristics of lesbian, gay or bisexual persons’ – Asylum Policy Instruction: Sexual Identity Issues in the Asylum Claim. UK Home Office. 11 February 2015.

‘Section 8 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 requires decision-makers to take into account the claimant’s conduct when applying the benefit of the doubt to unsubstantiated material facts. It is essential to provide the claimant with an opportunity to explain the reasons for such behaviour’ – Asylum Policy Instruction: Assessing Credibility and Refugee Status. UK Home Office. January 2015.

‘This report presents country of origin information (COI) on Zimbabwe up to 27th November 2014 on issues of relevance in refugee status determination for Zimbabwean nationals’ – Zimbabwe Country Report. Asylum Research Consultancy. January 2015.

´Human Rights Watch is not aware of a single instance in which officials prosecuted a perpetrator of an attack against a journalist or media outlet since 2011’ – War on the Media: Journalists under Attack in Libya. Human Rights Watch. February 2015.

‘[J]ust as allowing migrants to drown in the Mediterranean is unconscionable, and leaving Jordan, Lebanon and Kenya (and to a lesser extent Italy) to absorb the outflows is unfair (as well as unworkable in the long term), so failing to offer training and education to those who could benefit from it is short-sighted’ – Europe’s refugee crisis is an economic opportunity lost. Charlotte Harford. Financial Times. 12 February 2015.

‘A lawyer told Human Rights Watch in December that interrogators subjected Shehata, who once led Egypt's negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, and his brother to electrocution and other mistreatment to force Shehata to confess to weapons possession and other charges related to violence’ – Egypt: Investigate Professor's Allegations of Torture. Human Rights Watch. 3 February 2015.

‘The same presiding judge who handed down a life sentence against Ahmed Douma today yesterday handed down 183 death sentences in a separate mass trial’ – Egypt: Hundreds of life sentences handed down in mass trial ‘farcical.’ Amnesty International. 4 February 2015.

‘Numerous conclusions of UNHCR's Executive Committee, of which Australia is a founding member, have attested to the overriding importance of the non-refoulement principle irrespective of the geographic location of the asylum-seeker or refugee’ – UNHCR Legal Position: Despite court ruling on Sri Lankans detained at sea, Australia bound by international obligations. UNHCR. 4 February 2015.

‘[A]ny doubt on the age of an applicant will necessarily persist after a radiological examination, which automatically triggers an in dubio pro reo rule in EU law, according to which the applicant has to be treated as a child’ – Junk Science? Four Arguments Against the Radiological Age Assessment of Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum. Gregor Noll. Lund University, Faculty of Law. January 2015.

‘[T]he Upper Tribunal, when considering whether a same sex orientated male who may be at risk of harm from his family could be expected to relocate, held that “India is a country of 1.2 billion people and we have not been drawn to any evidence that there is a central registration system in place which would enable the police to check the whereabouts of inhabitants in their own state, let alone in any of the other states or unions within the country”’ – India: Background information, including actors of protection, and internal relocation. UK Home Office. February 2015.

‘In the first half of 2014, 34 percent of children in detention were assessed as having mental health disorders at levels of seriousness that were comparable with children receiving outpatient mental health services in Australia. Less than two percent of children in the Australian population were receiving outpatient mental health services in 2014’ – The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention. Australian Human Rights Commission. December 2014.

[rightsinexile]

Back to the Dark Ages? The imminent danger of a regional domino effect in Obama's hardline policy for mothers fleeing Central America

By Galya B. Ruffer, director of the Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffett Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University and co-editor of Adjudicating refugee and asylum status: The role of witness, expertise, and testimony, and Lory D. Rosenberg, founder of IDEAS Consultation and Coaching, empowering successful immigration lawyers, and a former immigration appeals judge on the U.S. Board of immigration Appeals. Reprinted with permission from the author, originally featured in the Huffington Post.

  After long hours of working out the logistics of the bond arrangements, the Artesia legal defense team was pleased to hear that the first mother and daughter were released from the federal detention center in Artesia, N.M., enjoying a happy meal, en route to El Paso to catch a greyhound bus to reunite with their relatives. That was August 19th. The news circulated among the mothers and children - there was hope. Those who were found to have a credible fear of persecution would be released on bond pending resolution of their asylum claims. How now to tell those same mothers and children, whose joy and relief could be heard over the phone after they were safely reunited with family, that the government was now appealing the bond decision and that, if successful, they would have to return to the detention center. How could this be?

It shouldn't be this way.

While we applaud the recent news that the Obama plan to allow 4,000 young children from Central American countries to apply for refugee status in the United States (NYT, September 30, 2014), we remain concerned about the administration's hard-line policy of penalizing mothers and children who flee to the United States in search of safety. In particular, the indiscriminate appeal of judicial orders releasing them from custody - harkens back to a time the United States had not joined the world community in committing to a cooperative system of surrogate protection for individuals whose home countries could not, or would not, protect them from persecution, torture and the corresponding displacement that accompanies such mistreatment.

We should be long past that dark period, given that we have had dispositive laws and policies in place for nearly 25 years. Ignoring or shrinking from our responsibilities under the Refugee Act of 1980 creates an imminent danger that other signatory countries to the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol will become complacent about their obligations at a time when we need more countries actively on board. We can see this effect happening in Mexico where the U.S. pressure to stem the tide of those fleeing murder, extortion, sexual abuse and gender based violence in Central America has resulted in Mexico ‘sweeping them off trains, setting up more roadway checkpoints and raiding hotels and flophouses’ (NYT, 22 September 2014). On this 30th Anniversary of Latin America's Cartagena Declaration, the instrument setting high standards for our region's strong asylum tradition, Mexico should be affording the people fleeing Central America a safe and fair path to asylum, not deporting them. It shouldn't be this way.

As pro bono counsel working with the American Immigration Lawyer's Association Pro Bono Project at the federal detention center in Artesia, New Mexico, we felt Artesia could have been Oswego, N.Y., August 1944, when 982 European refugees aboard the U.S. Army Transport Henry Gibbins arrived at Fort Ontario, a former army camp authorized to serve as a temporary haven pursuant to an executive order issued by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Oswego refugees, many women and children, were flocking to Italy from the Balkans and Central Europe, paying smugglers to get across unwelcoming borders, and hampering our military efforts by clogging the roads and needing to be housed and fed. The selected refugees started out as unwanted guests who had to verify their understanding no entry visa would be issued. They remained detained until January 1946 when Truman finally signed an executive order allowing their admission as part of an annual displaced persons quota. At that point, the town cheered, having been won over by the refugees’ plight. Those unwanted refugees went on to become U.S. citizens and contributors to our society - radiologists, veterinarians, teachers, lawyers, pharmacists, poets, mothers and fathers.

A similar drama is playing out in the lives of the women and children detained in Artesia, but the lessons of Oswego seem lost. And today, the government's use of detention and a no-bond policy to deter asylum seekers conflicts with our asylum law. It is contrary to statutory provisions that allow people fleeing persecution to enter our country without prior authorization (even by paying a smuggler or using false documentation) as long as, within a reasonable time, they present themselves to a border officer and seek asylum. In detaining women and children under a no-bond policy, the U.S. is circumventing the intent of the law to provide entry to those fleeing persecution and in need of asylum.

We are setting the worst possible example for the world by jailing mothers and their children to make a policy statement ostensibly intended to stem migration flows. In the absence of a viable third-country or in-country system set up to process the large numbers of refugees fleeing Central America, these mothers and children have no other option but to cross the U.S. border and request asylum. We ask countries the world over to accept refugees from nearby war-torn regions, but have failed to take leadership in facilitating the acceptance of refugees in our own region.

Instead of setting a no-bond policy under the guise of protecting ‘national security’ and fast-tracking the deportation hearings of the mothers and children fleeing Central America through Mexico, the U.S. should be a leader in offering meaningful protection from harm. We need to establish a viable program that observes due process principles and comports with our asylum laws, as well as with the spirit of international refugee treaties. We need to implement it in cooperation with our regional neighbors so that the conditions giving rise to violence and exploitation along the way by criminals and smugglers are eradicated.

It is imperative that we stop jailing mothers and children systematically in so-called family detention centers, where they face continued fear and uncertainty instead of safety and succor. It shouldn't be this way.

[rightsinexile]

ABA section of International Law Spring Meeting panel highlights concerns over the cessation of status for Rwandan refugees

The following press release was written by Galya Ruffer, Director of the International Studies Program at Northwestern University.

Friday, April 26, 2013 - The ABA International Refugee Law Committee and the Africa Committee co-sponsored panel at the Section of International Law Spring Meeting in Washington, D.C., “Rwandan Refugees – Is it Safe to Come Home?” addressed the situation of Rwandan refugees in light of the UNHCR recommendation to invoke Cessation of their refugee status on 30 June 2013. The Cessation applies to those who escaped events that occurred between 1956 and 1998, and not to those who sought asylum since. This suggests an immediate contradiction. How can Rwanda be safe for some refugees and not for those who are still fleeing? Rwandan refugees worldwide have launched a campaign urging the legal community to question whether Rwanda is a 'safe' country under the 1951 Geneva Convention.

The panel, organized and moderated by Northwestern University Professor Galya Ruffer, provided a context of the situation in Rwanda today, considered the requirements for invocation of the Cessation of refugee status and presented a case study of Rwandan refugees today and their concerns in regards to Cessation of their status. The focus of the panel then shifted to lawyering and advocacy in such a situation in order to consider strategies, ethical concerns and responsibilities of lawyering in situations of severe oppression where lives are at risk.

Speaking to a packed room, panelists included Filip Reyntjens, Professor of African Law and Politics at the Institute of Development Policy and Management, University of Antwerp and author of The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996-2006 (Cambridge University Press 2009) and Political Governance in Post-Genocide Rwanda (Cambridge University Press 2013), Olivia Bueno, International Refugee Rights Initiative’s (IRRI), Associate Director and Mutuyimana Manzi a Rwandan refugee in Uganda since 2007.

After providing an historical overview of the refugee crises in Rwanda, Professor Reyntjens analyzed the political and social situation in Rwanda today under Kagame, which he described as “living under a Volcano.” Mr. Manzi detailed evidence of the oppression of Hutus living in Rwanda, which Professor Reyntjens called “structural violence,” as the cause for ongoing flight. Mr. Manzi then talked about the problems refugees have faced in Uganda since invocation of Cessation in 2009 including forced repatriation, unlawful detention, withdrawal of land on which to grow food and shrinking food rations, abductions and killing. Shifting the focus to the concerns of lawyering within Cessation, Ms. Bueno discussed the difficult choices IRRI has had to make in regards to legal advocacy and the push for UNHCR to adopt a disaggregated approach.

As if playing into the theme of the panel, the Q&A was derailed by persons not registered for the ABA meeting: first by the Rwandan Ambassador spoke, followed by others, all seeking to discredit the label that Professor Reyntjens and Mr. Manzi’s had given them, by calling them genocidaires. The panel ended with moderator Professor Ruffer noting that in this difficult and complicated environment, it is indeed important to consider how lawyers can give voice and representation without making refugees more vulnerable.