Posts tagged human rights
Tumble DC 25
Marginally better than silence
[I]t will become increasingly difficult to convince donors that alternative energy is worth investing in if the expensive technology they are funding is destroyed. After the order issued against the Imneizil solar panels in September, six alternative energy systems built by Comet ME in Hebron have received demolition orders.
(Source: Guardian)
Mystery Disease In Central America Kills Tens of Thousands
A mysterious epidemic is devastating the Pacific coast of Central America, killing more than 24,000 people in El Salvador and Nicaragua since 2000 and striking thousands of others with chronic kidney disease at rates unseen virtually anywhere else. Scientists say they have received reports of the phenomenon as far north as southern Mexico and as far south as Panama.
Last year it reached the point where El Salvador’s health minister, Dr. Maria Isabel Rodriguez, appealed for international help, saying the epidemic was undermining health systems.
Wilfredo Ordonez, who has harvested corn, sesame and rice for more than 30 years in the Bajo Lempa region of El Salvador, was hit by the chronic disease when he was 38. Ten years later, he depends on dialysis treatments he administers to himself four times a day.
“This is a disease that comes with no warning, and when they find it, it’s too late,” Ordonez said as he lay on a hammock on his porch.
Many of the victims were manual laborers or worked in sugar cane fields that cover much of the coastal lowlands. Patients, local doctors and activists say they believe the culprit lurks among the agricultural chemicals workers have used for years with virtually none of the protections required in more developed countries. But a growing body of evidence supports a more complicated and counterintuitive hypothesis.
The roots of the epidemic, scientists say, appear to lie in the grueling nature of the work performed by its victims, including construction workers, miners and others who labor hour after hour without enough water in blazing temperatures, pushing their bodies through repeated bouts of extreme dehydration and heat stress for years on end. Many start as young as 10. The punishing routine appears to be a key part of some previously unknown trigger of chronic kidney disease, which is normally caused by diabetes and high-blood pressure, maladies absent in most of the patients in Central America.
“The thing that evidence most strongly points to is this idea of manual labor and not enough hydration,” said Daniel Brooks, a professor of epidemiology at Boston University’s School of Public Health, who has worked on a series of studies of the kidney disease epidemic.
Because hard work and intense heat alone are hardly a phenomenon unique to Central America, some researchers will not rule out manmade factors. But no strong evidence has turned up.
It is not uncommon for many of these individuals to work themselves to death, all the while receiving little to no pay, and leaving their families behind in a tough situation. This is precisely why workers’ rights are so vitally important. Many workers around the world aren’t even afforded what we would consider the bare minimum of protection. It’s absolutely critical that we grant workers’ rights that will place them in conditions that would be considered humanly decent to all and to do away with the parasitic political/economic structures and institutions that make such poor conditions not only necessary for those workers to survive but for our capitalistic system to function as it does.
The Obama Administration asked the Armed Services Committee to ensure that the National Defense Authorization Act would allow for the indefinite detention of US citizens, then when national outrage arose he promised to veto the bill because of the very section he requested, according to Senator Carl Levin.
Ten Reasons Why You Should Never Accept a Diamond Ring from Anyone, Under Any Circumstances, Even If They Really Want to Give You One
1. You’ve Been Psychologically Conditioned To Want a Diamond
The diamond engagement ring is a 63-year-old invention of N.W.Ayer advertising agency. The De Beers diamond cartel contracted N.W.Ayer to create a demand for what are, essentially, useless hunks of rock.
2. Diamonds are Priced Well Above Their Value
The De Beers cartel has systematically held diamond prices at levels far greater than their abundance would generate under anything even remotely resembling perfect competition. All diamonds not already under its control are bought by the cartel, and then the De Beers cartel carefully managed world diamond supply in order to keep prices steadily high.
3. Diamonds Have No Resale or Investment Value
Any diamond that you buy or receive will indeed be yours forever: De Beers™ advertising deliberately brain-washed women not to sell; the steady price is a tool to prevent speculation in diamonds; and no dealer will buy a diamond from you. You can only sell it at a diamond purchasing center or a pawn shop where you will receive a tiny fraction of its original “value.”
4. Diamond Miners are Disproportionately Exposed to HIV/AIDS
Many diamond mining camps enforce all-male, no-family rules. Men contract HIV/AIDS from camp sex-workers, while women married to miners have no access to employment, no income outside of their husbands and no bargaining power for negotiating safe sex, and thus are at extremely high risk of contracting HIV.
5. Open-Pit Diamond Mines Pose Environmental Threats
Diamond mines are open pits where salts, heavy minerals, organisms, oil, and chemicals from mining equipment freely leach into ground-water, endangering people in nearby mining camps and villages, as well as downstream plants and animals.
6. Diamond Mine-Owners Violate Indigenous People’s Rights
Diamond mines in Australia, Canada, India and many countries in Africa are situated on lands traditionally associated with indigenous peoples. Many of these communities have been displaced, while others remain, often at great cost to their health, livelihoods and traditional cultures.
7. Slave Laborers Cut and Polish Diamonds
More than one-half of the world’s diamonds are processed in India where many of the cutters and polishers are bonded child laborers. Bonded children work to pay off the debts of their relatives, often unsuccessfully. When they reach adulthood their debt is passed on to their younger siblings or to their own children.
8. Conflict Diamonds Fund Civil Wars in Africa
There is no reliable way to insure that your diamond was not mined or stolen by government or rebel military forces in order to finance civil conflict. Conflict diamonds are traded either for guns or for cash to pay and feed soldiers.
9. Diamond Wars are Fought Using Child Warriors
Many diamond producing governments and rebel forces use children as soldiers, laborers in military camps, and sex slaves. Child soldiers are given drugs to overcome their fear and reluctance to participate in atrocities.
10. Small Arms Trade is Intimately Related to Diamond Smuggling
Illicit diamonds inflame the clandestine trade of small arms. There are 500 billion small arms in the world today which are used to kill 500,000 people annually, the vast majority of whom are non-combatants.This is one of the worst things involved in the marriage system. Please, if you choose to get married do not involve a diamond ring in it. Do not accept diamonds as a gift and do not buy it for a loved one.
(Source: rubyvroom)
Thanks for the precedent Mr. Obama!
Two young Pakistani boys, Tariq Khan (16) and his cousin Wahid (12), were killed in a drone strike just four days after one of them, Tariq, traveled to Islamabad to protest the CIA's covert drone campaign.
Viewed from a drone, any adult male in the tribal areas can look like a target, according to Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who is taking on the CIA.
“A Taliban or non-Taliban would be dressed in the same way,” he said. “Everyone has a beard, a turban and an AK-47 because every person carries a weapon in that area, so anyone could be target.”
Mr Akbar is suing the CIA for compensation in the Islamabad High Court, and plans to file a Supreme Court action.
He claims the US is getting away with murder in North Waziristan. It’s a view shared by the British legal charity Reprieve, whose director, Clive Stafford Smith, has been meeting drone victims in Pakistan.
“What’s going on here, unfortunately, is murder,” he said.
“There’s a war going on in Afghanistan, but none here in Pakistan, so what the CIA is doing here is illegal.”
(via mohandasgandhi)
These children, many of whom should never have been separated from their parents in the first place, face often insurmountable obstacles to reunifying with their mothers and fathers. Though child welfare departments are required by federal law to reunify children with any parents who are able to provide for the basic safety of their children, detention makes this all but impossible. Then, once parents are deported, families are often separated for long periods. Ultimately, child welfare departments and juvenile courts too often move to terminate the parental rights of deportees and put children up for adoption, rather than attempt to unify the family as they would in other circumstances.
Thousands of Kids Taken From Parents In U.S. Deportation System - Colorlines
More at the link, including some heartbreaking accounts of this system in action.
(via redlightpolitics)
I can’t believe they jail people in the UK for insults
Insulting a group of people should never be enough to deprive someone of their freedom, especially when the insults were over sports and via facebook. This specifically is what blew my mind:
Birrell posted sectarian comments about Catholics and Celtic fans between 28 February and 8 March, just days after being released early from a 12-month jail sentence.
On 1 March, two days before the Old Firm match, Birrell posted: “Hope they (Celtic fans) all die. Simple. Catholic scumbags ha ha.”
On 4 March, the day after the game, he wrote: “Proud to hate Fenian tattie farmers. Simple ha ha.”
Four days later Birrell posted: “They’re all ploughing the fields the dirty scumbags.”
He also posted abuse directed at the Pope.
Passing sentence, Sheriff Totten told Birrell: “I am satisfied that the nature of this offence, and in particular your previous record, means that I require to impose a prison sentence on you.
“I do want to make clear today that in selecting a prison sentence I also have in mind that the court should be sending out a clear message to deter others who might be tempted to behave in this way”…
At an earlier hearing defence solicitor John McLaughlin said: “These postings were distasteful and abusive. However, his postings did not contain threats or incitement to violence.
“There was no mention on them of Neil Lennon or the manager of Celtic.”
There’s no question that this guy was a massive dick, but do we really want the government telling us that if we insult the wrong group, we go to jail?
Israelis Announce Demolition of Spanish-made Palestinian Power Plant
The photovoltaic central Emnaizel, a West Bank village south of Hebron, is brand new. It was built in 2009 at a cost of 292,000 euros, provided by the Spanish International Cooperation Agency, and provides electricity to 40 families of Emnaizel, a school and a medical center. The Israeli army has announced that the plant will be demolished within a week, with two houses, for lack of building permit.
Emnaizel is in Zone C, the part of the occupied territories in which the Palestinian Authority has no authority. Building permits must be issued by the Civil Authority, which despite its name is the agency that manages the Israeli military occupation, and almost never granted. Israel’s strategy in the southern Hebron hills is to deny all the options to push Palestinian rural to urban and Jewish settlers to leave the control of arable land.
Without the plant, consisting of a solar field of 30 by 40 meters and a building for the batteries and installed by the Spanish company Basic Energy Systems (Seba), Emnaizel run out of electricity since being in the Zone C prevents you from connecting to the electricity networks Palestinians. “The soldiers came to town Tuesday and posted on the central door of the notice that the demolition would take place the next day 18, until then had not been informed of the intentions of demolition,” a Spanish aid worker who works in the area .
The Israeli NGO Rabbis for Human Rights has taken legal defense Emnaizel families in the case of the power plant and has called for the suspension of burofax demolition process. The Israeli Civil Authority, however, is on holiday until 19 for parties of “Sukkot”, which drastically reduces the leeway for lawyers. Yesterday was impossible to contact a spokesman for the Civil Authority.
Translation from Google Translate. A proper “permit” to build on lands not legally owned by Israel (yet) was not sought, so Israel will use it’s military to destroy civilian infrastructure. That this is an overt policy of racial and ethnic discrimination on the part of the Israelis should be a secret to no one.
Secret U.S. panel can put Americans on "kill list'
(Reuters) - American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior U.S. government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to U.S. officials.
There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.
A group of people (we’re not allowed to know who) that have no public accountability, aren’t elected, keep no records on and offer no justification for their decisions are allowed to strip legal rights from any US citizen and order them killed. This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s how our Government operates.
