Monday, Jun 01st
Last update09:05:06 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
The draconian legal mechanisms that condemn Muslim Americans who speak out publicly about the outrages we commit in the Middle East have left many, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, wasting away in supermax prisons.
These citizens posed no security threat. But they dared to speak a truth about the sordid conduct of our nation that the state found unpalatable. And in the bipartisan war on terror, waged by Republicans and Democrats, this ugly truth in America is branded seditious.
Not so fast, said the U.S. Trustee, the federal agency that oversees such cases. Just like that, the Ziviello-Howells found themselves in the thick of an ongoing battle over the legal rights of gay married couples.
A new initiative could deprive Israeli human rights organizations that cooperated with the Goldstone Commission from benefiting from National Service civilian volunteers.
Behind the initiative is MK Israel Hasson (Kadima ), who recently asked Prof. Daniel Hershkowitz (Habayit Hayehudi ), the minister responsible for the National Service administration, to formulate new criteria for determining which organizations in the country are eligible to receive National Service volunteers, as part of new legislation that will govern the activities of the National Service.
Diamond, now 69 and a retired social services and human-resources executive who lives in Northwest Washington, racked up his arrests protesting segregation, voting-rights violations and other discriminatory practices in an activist career that took him from Howard University to the Deep South as part of the Freedom Riders, blacks and whites — many of them students — who challenged segregation in public transportation in 1961, mostly in Mississippi.
This month, as Freedom Riders across the country celebrate the 50th anniversary of their activism, Diamond and other D.C. residents reflected on the movement and the special place the city holds in its history.
After Tasering, kicking and hitting a man in the head with flashlights while calling him a "wetback," Phoenix police officers falsely accused him of assaulting them and running away, but the man can't fight or run at all because he is paralyzed on one side of his body from childhood polio, he says in a civil rights complaint.
Rodriquez, whom the officers accused of aggravated assault against a police officer after they Tasered, kicked and hit beat him with police-issued flashlights, says he could not have assaulted the officers or run because the left side of his body is paralyzed from polio.
Rodriquez the three officers - Tedesco, Mills and Neidenbach - approached him outside of a church on May 27, 2010.
An Afghan detainee at the US prison facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has died in an apparent suicide, the US military said. The prisoner, identified as Inayatullah, a 37-year-old accused of being a member of al-Qaeda, was found dead by guards conducting routine checks at the facility on Wednesday.
"An investigation is under way to determine the exact circumstances of what happened," Navy Commander Tamsen Reese, a spokeswoman at the Guantanamo Bay US naval base, said.
The Palestinian "Arab Spring" is arriving and Israel has no political strategy to deal with it. Instead, Israel used the only weapon in its current arsenal - brute force.
They are extraordinary scenes. Film shot on mobile phones captured the moment on Sunday when at least 1,000 Palestinian refugees marched across no-man's land to one of the most heavily protected borders in the world, the one separating Syria from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
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