Human Rights
What an honor to be in Cuba for the first celebration of One Billion Rising!
150 of us from the United States had travelled to Cuba with CODEPINK: Women for Peace in the largest delegation of Americans to visit Cuba since the December 17, 2014 announcement of opening of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba.
Realizing that our delegation called “To Cuba With Love” would be in Cuba on February 14, Valentine’s Day, we asked our host organization the Cuban Institute with the Peoples (ICAP) if there was a venue in Havana where we could dance in the worldwide campaign to end violence against women.
The dynamic ICAP director and member of the Cuban Parliament Kenia Serrano suggested that we have the dance at the annual Cuba International Book Fair held in the San Carlos de la Cabana fortress, the scenic fort located across the harbor from Old Havana.
Dance at a Book Fair we asked?
Texas Baptists confirm Obama’s comments about Christian crimes
The American torture president and self-professed Christian, George W. Bush, gratefully accepted an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from the Christian-ideology-based University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas, on February 11, in a “public” event that was closed to most of the public. The only direct media coverage allowed for the event was by Fox News and the college public relations team.
Even though it might have been headlined as “Christians Honor War Criminal,” there were apparently no national news stories about the former president’s award. Five days after the fact, the Washington-insider publication, the Hill ran a short summary noting that Bush had said, “Evil is evil.”
BANGKOK, Thailand -- The U.S. and Russia should destroy their deadly
smallpox stockpiles or be "guilty of crimes against humanity," because
the virus slaughtered hundreds of millions of people before it was
stopped in 1980 and would kill again if it escapes a laboratory, the
American who led the global eradication said.
"There were two laboratories that have smallpox, we know that for
sure, one was the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) in Atlanta, and
the second was the Institute of Virus Preparations in Moscow," Dr.
Donald A. Henderson said in an interview.
"There, the virus is -- we believe -- sequestered. All [other]
countries have signed off that they don't have any smallpox," said Dr.
Henderson, who led the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Global
Smallpox Eradication Campaign which declared worldwide success 35
years ago.
Dr. Henderson was here in Bangkok, Thailand, to receive the annual
$100,000 Prince Mahidol Award in the Field of Public Health on January
28.
During the 20th century, smallpox killed 300 million to 500 million
“It’d be really hard to have a higher recidivism rate than we have in Cook County.”
Maybe this is the place to start a brief meditation on changing the world, or at least Chicago . . . known to some of its residents as “Chiraq.”
The speaker is Elena Qunitana, executive director of the Adler Institute on Public Safety and Social Justice, which, in partnership with Roosevelt University’s Mansfield Institute for Social Justice and Transformation, recently completed a study on Cook County’s dysfunctional juvenile justice system.
What we’re doing isn’t working, justice-wise, order-wise, sanity-wise. The state of Illinois is bankrupt and yet its jails are full to bursting, at a cost, per occupant, equal to or greater than the cost of luxury suites at its ritziest hotels. And 90 percent of the teenagers who enter the system come back within three years of their release. This is no surprise: The system is a spiral of entrapment, especially for young men of color.
Condoleezza Rice made headlines when she testified Thursday at the leak trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling — underscoring that powerful people in the Bush administration went to great lengths a dozen years ago to prevent disclosure of a classified operation. But as The Associated Press noted, “While Rice’s testimony helped establish the importance of the classified program in question, her testimony did not implicate Sterling in any way as the leaker.”
Few pixels and little ink went to the witness just before Rice — former CIA spokesman William Harlow — whose testimony stumbled into indicating why he thought of Sterling early on in connection with the leak, which ultimately resulted in a ten-count indictment.
Harlow, who ran the CIA press office, testified that Sterling came to mind soon after New York Times reporter James Risen first called him, on April 3, 2003, about the highly secret Operation Merlin, a CIA program that provided faulty nuclear weapon design information to Iran.
In the wake of the failure of a grand jury proceeding to indict Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson Missouri, President Obama has finally taken a material rather than rhetorical step on the issue. The widespread unrest sparked by public anger at the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, who witnesses testified had his hands up surrendering to Wilson, could not be ignored by the Whitehouse any longer. Purportedly to institute policy changes to prevent more Ferguson situations, and return the nation to a modicum of normalcy in the wake of widespread domestic unrest, the President has appointed a commission to recommend national policing reforms.
That commission, rather than being stacked with civil libertarians, seems to be built around a handful of national policing figures with little regard for human rights. Some figures involved in this new process have a long history of suppressing domestic dissent. Their long history of violent repression, and the solutions they and the White House have already made, may lead to a vast expansion of police presence and domestic surveillance.
Serious questions have been raised about the abuse of police powers in favour of far right politicians after a whistleblower from nationalist party United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) claimed to have been framed and intimidated by police officers with extreme right sympathies.
Jasna Badzak, who worked as a press officer for senior UKIP Member of European Parliament Gerard Batten before reporting his incitements to racial hatred to the police, has revealed that she believes she was the target of a criminal conspiracy by several officers to set her up. An anonymous journalist involved in reporting Badzak's case has since sent evidence to former Conservative MP Louise Mensch which, if true, “threaten[s] them if they wrote negative stories on Batten”.
Edward Snowden was not cleared for the details of this program. He revealed it's existence nonetheless. The program is called BULLRUN and it appears to have been going on for a very long time. Snowden's 2013 revelation of it in the New York Times does not appear to have slowed it down. In fact, it appears that the NSA and FBI have retreated to a more comfortable controversy from the Clinton Era, complete with technology from the time period. Remember the Clipper Chip? Like Vanilla Ice, it endlessly returns from the 1990s, growing worse each time. However, the Director of the FBI never suggested the American public should be forced to listen to “Ice, Ice Baby” over and over again.
Nostalgia for the secret programs of the 1990s apparently is not confined to X-Files re-runs. During the Clinton Administration, the NSA was greatly concerned that the average person or company might soon be able to have government grade encryption not easily breakable by them. The SKIPJACK algorithm, codenamed and commonly known as CLIPPER for audio and CAPSTONE for data, was their solution. The method, and it's patent, were classified as secret but not top-secret, until 1998.
John Crawford III went shopping at WalMart. John Crawford III was going to buy a pellet gun. He picked one out. He called his girlfriend on the phone and was chatting casually. He was shot dead by a policeman before he reached the checkout line. He was black. The officer who killed him with two rounds from an AR-15 was white. According to both a grand jury and a special prosecutor appointed by Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, no crime was committed other than a man shopping while black.
DeWine had refused to release the store surveillance video (above) to the public prior to the grand jury being empaneled, claiming that would contaminate the jury pool. Crawford's family had seen the videotape and claimed that DeWine had promised to release it. This did not stop the special prosecutor, Mark Piepmeier, from showing the video to a key witness prior to the grand jury, enabling that witness, Ronald Ritchie, to possibly change his story.