Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Earlier this month, President Obama asked the Department of Health and Human Services to order all hospitals that participate in Medicaid and Medicare to allow patients to designate who shall be allowed to visit them and make medical decisions on their behalf. This is one of the most pro-LGBT rights policies so far adopted by [...]
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Also tagged Civil Rights, Congress, DADT, Discrimination, DOMA, Gender, Harry Reid, Identity, LBGT, Military, Nancy Pelosi, Pentagon, Steny Hoyer
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Hundreds of Sunni men disappeared for months into a secret Baghdad prison under the jurisdiction of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s military office, where many were routinely tortured until the country’s Human Rights Ministry gained access to the facility, Iraqi officials say. The men were detained by the Iraqi army in October in sweeps targeting Sunni [...]
For women in Iraq, running for office is an especially risky proposition. The country’s Constitution, like those of many nations that have been racked by conflict, requires that a quarter of all parliamentary seats must go to women. Yet even as the number of female leaders and political activists has increased, so has the backlash. [...]
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Also tagged Afghanistan, Angola, Discrimination, Dissidents, Feminists, Gender, Iraq, Iraqi Womens Network, Liberia, One Million Signatures, Rwanda, Shirin Ebadi, Somalia, Women
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Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Israelis spent the first day of Passover reading headline stories about 15-year-old Mohammad Zeid Al Farmawi, shot dead by the IDF, according to Palestinian sources. (The IDF but denied the death report). I don’t know if Mohammad was a first-born son. But his mother and father are surely crying tears as bitter as any the Israelites ever [...]
Amnesty International on Tuesday challenged the Chinese authorities to reveal how many people they execute and sentence to death, as the organization published its world overview of the death penalty for 2009. The report, Death Sentences and Executions in 2009, reveals that at least 714 people were executed in 18 countries and at least 2001 [...]
This year at Davos, Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, told an audience of journalists that his company is not a country, does not set laws, and does not have a police force. Yet in its showdown with China, Google is acting as the ambassador for the internet. Well, somebody has to. Next to no one has been [...]
Filed in News Blurbs, Technology
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Also tagged Alan Davidson, Censorship, China, Cyber Attacks, Digital Rights, Dissidents, Eric Schmidt, Espionage, Freedom of Expression, Google, Internet, Jeff Jarvis, John Perry Barlow
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A law that provides blanket immunity and pardons former members of Afghanistan’s armed factions for war crimes and human rights abuses committed prior to December 2001 was quietly enacted three years ago by parliament, despite previous assurances by President Hamid Karzai that he would not sign it or allow it to take effect. According to [...]
(Xinhua) Updated: 2010-03-12 16:52 BEIJING – China’s Information Office of the State Council published a report titled “The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009” here Friday. Following is the full text: The State Department of the United States released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2009 on March 11, 2010, posing [...]
Filed in Documents, News Blurbs, Notable
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Also tagged AIDs, Arms Trafficking, BATF, Censorship, Child Labor, China, CIA, Civil Rights, Crime, Cuba, Cuban Embargo, Detainees, Discrimination, DOJ, ECHELON, Education, Environment, Equal Pay, Espionage, FBI, FISA, Freedom of Press, Freedom of Speech, Hate Crimes, Healthcare, Hegemony, Homeless, Homelessness, Hunger, Hypocrisy, Imperialism, Internet, Labor, Military, Minorities, Murder, NSA, Oppression, Overseas Military Installations, Patriot Act, Poverty, Prisoners, Prisons, Racism, Rape, Rendition, Surveillance, Torture, Unemployment, US Human Rights Record 2009, Veterans, Walmart, Wiretapping, Women
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We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. In the same [...]
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Last May, when I interviewed Zinn, he reflected on Barack Obama’s first months in office: “I wish President Obama would listen carefully to Martin Luther King. I’m sure he pays verbal homage, as everyone does, to Martin Luther King, but he ought to think before he sends missiles over Pakistan, before he agrees to this [...]
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
US President Barack Obama intends to go ahead with plans to meet the Dalai Lama despite warnings from China not to, a White House spokesman has said. Mr Obama told China’s leaders last year in Beijing that he would meet with the Tibetan spiritual leader, White House spokesman Bill Burton said. China has warned that ties [...]
Saturday, January 30, 2010
We were in a restaurant at the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan. Also there was Anthony Arnove, who had worked closely with Mr. Zinn in recent years and had collaborated on his last major project, “The People Speak.” It’s a film in which well-known performers bring to life the inspirational words of everyday citizens whose struggles [...]
Thursday, January 28, 2010
A major new report on secret detention policies (.doc) around the world, conducted by four independent UN human rights experts, concludes that, “On a global scale, secret detention in connection with counter-terrorist policies remains a serious problem,” and, “If resorted to in a widespread and systematic manner, secret detention might reach the threshold of a crime [...]
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Also tagged Afghanistan, CIA, Detainees, Disappeared, Guantanamo, Iraq, JSOC, Rendition, Secret Detention, Secret Prisons, Torture, UN
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Thursday, January 28, 2010
At the heart of Zinn’s sensibility was the idea that American history is not the exclusive province of senators and generals or, for that matter, historians. It belongs to everyone (a notion he touched upon in one of his final interviews). It’s a belief that led Zinn beyond the safe confines of academia. A former [...]
Saturday, January 23, 2010
“A commitment to human rights starts with universal standards and with holding everyone accountable to those standards, including ourselves… When injustice anywhere is ignored, justice everywhere is denied. Acknowledging and remedying mistakes does not make us weaker, it reaffirms the strengths of our principles and institutions.” Not Amnesty International’s words, but those of US Secretary [...]
Ensign asked Blair why it made sense to restrict interrogations of terrorism suspects to the techniques listed in the mostly-Geneva-Conventions-compliant Army Field Manual on Interrogations, as Obama insisted in one of the first executive orders of his presidency. Blair strongly strongly defended the decision. “We looked at that quite carefully,” Blair said. “We do not [...]
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Also tagged Army Field Manual on Interrogations, Dennis Blair, Detainees, DNI, Geneva Conventions, Intelligence, John Ensign, Law, Military Tribunals, Miranda Warning, National Security, Secret Prisons, Terrorism, Torture
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Thursday, January 21, 2010
U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that December’s mass cyber attack against 33 American companies was most likely the result of a coordinated espionage campaign endorsed by the Chinese government. Google’s revelation that they’d been hit was deemed a “watershed” moment by security industry analysts, but the other 32 companies who were hit have not followed [...]
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
In March 2009 Villeneuve uncovered “GhostNet,” (.pdf) a cyber-spying operation originating in China that was said to have targeted the Dalai Lama and other human-rights activists. Though Villeneuve has no direct knowledge of the attacks discovered by Google, he says it’s likely that they match the methods he has been monitoring. Villeneuve says the hackers [...]
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be [...]
Saturday, December 26, 2009
This is not where the Obama administration imagined it would be 11 months ago, when the president signed an executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010. That day, the president set in motion an interagency task force to determine which detainees could be released and whether any could be prosecuted. [...]
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Also tagged Afghanistan War, Barack Obama, Courts, Detainees, George W Bush, Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Indefinite Detention, Iraq War, Law, Military, Military Tribunals, Prisons
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Saturday, December 19, 2009
The Obama administration refused Friday to follow a federal judge’s order to provide insurance benefits to the wife of a lesbian court employee in San Francisco and said its hands were tied by a discriminatory law. “This issue shows exactly why Congress needs to repeal” the law, which prohibits federal benefits to same-sex couples, government [...]
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Perry v. Schwarzenegger indeed asks the “ultimate question” of whether gays have a federal right to marry, but because the case is alleging that Prop. 8 violated the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution, the federal court decision will have implications for gay Americans in nearly every arena of public life, from housing to parenting [...]
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Also tagged California, Civil Rights, Constitution, Courts, David Boies, Law, LGBT, Marriage Equality, Perry v Schwarzenegger, Proposition 8, SCOTUS, Ted Olson, Vaughn Walker
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Friday, December 11, 2009
Excessive government secrecy is an enemy of human rights and the rule of law. President Obama deserves praise for rejecting the underlying policies that caused the United States so much harm during the Bush years. But in withholding photos of detainee abuse, preventing legal challenges to torture and warrantless surveillance, and thwarting impartial hearings into [...]
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Also tagged Barack Obama, CIA, DEA, Detainees, DOJ, Eric Holder, FOIA, Guantanamo, Law, National Security, Public Trust, Secrecy, Secret Prisons, State Secrets Privilege, Torture, Transparency
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Saturday, December 5, 2009
The highest court in Myanmar has agreed to consider an appeal by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the country’s battered democracy movement, over an 18-month extension of her longstanding house arrest, her lawyer said Friday. The decision by the Supreme Court comes after a lower court’s rejection in October and coincides with [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWBRyzPzKbY[/youtube] Talk by 27-year Veteran of the CIA, Ray McGovern, on “Why Accountability for Torture Is Crucial for Human Rights, Our Security and Our Souls” given November 12, 2009 at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. Talk sponsored by Washington State Religious Campaign Against Torture.
Listening To
