Urge the U.S. State Department to stop authorizing the shipment of weapons, ammunition, and equipment that Egypt’s government could use to violently suppress human rights.
Malawian president backs women in trousers after attacks
TW: violence
Malawi’s president says he has ordered police to arrest anyone who attacks women for wearing trousers in public.
President Bingu wa Mutharika spoke out on national radio after several women were beaten and stripped on the street for wearing non-traditional dress.
Police said they had arrested several street vendors after the attacks in Lilongwe and the commercial capital Blantyre.
Women’s groups say they are planning protests on Friday over the attacks.
Until 1994, women in the deeply conservative southern African country were banned from wearing trousers or mini-skirts under the autocratic rule of Hastings Banda.
Men were also banned from having long hair.
“I will not allow anyone to… go on the streets and start undressing women and girls wearing trousers, because that is illegal,” President Mutharika said in his nationwide broadcast.
“You are free to wear what you want. Women who want to wear trousers should do so, as you will be protected from thugs, vendors and terrorists.”
He said he was surprised that the women had been harassed when wearing trousers is “more protective to a woman than wearing a skirt”.
Meanwhile, women’s groups are planning protest marches and a sit-in in Blantyre on Friday.
Seodi White, a lawyer and leading women’s rights activist, said protesters would gather “in solidarity with the victims and to express our indignation at such barbaric treatment of mothers, wives and daughters of our country”.
“We are calling on all women and men of goodwill to urgently converge… for constructive engagement on the protection of women and the defence of their rights in a democratic Malawi,” she said.
Malawi’s Vice-President Joyce Banda earlier blamed the attacks on Malawi’s economic woes.
“There is so much suffering that people have decided to vent their frustrations on each other,” she said.
The country is currently suffering from severe shortages of fuel and foreign currency.
This mother and child—and this part of Mogadishu—show the toll of the overlapping political, security, and public health crises in Somalia, which have put an immense burden on women and children.
Years marked by conflict, drought, and a profound lack of governance culminated in a massive humanitarian crisis in the second half of 2011, to which MSF responded by expanding its programs in Somalia and for the huge numbers of Somali refugees who sought aid in Kenya and Ethiopia.
Photo: Somalia © Lynsey Addario/VII
The Turkish authorities have failed to address state officials’ alleged involvement in the killing of journalist and human rights activist Hrant Dink, Amnesty International said today, as the trial of 18 people accused of his murder drew to a close.
Hrant Dink, a Turkish citizen of Armenian descent, was killed on 19 January 2007 outside the offices of the Agos newspaper where he was the editor.
When the trial ends on Tuesday, almost five years to the day after the death of Hrant Dink, the authorities will still not have investigated the full circumstances behind his murder.
“Hrant Dink was murdered for peacefully expressing his opinions,” said Andrew Gardner Amnesty International’s expert on Turkey.
“The security services knew of the murder plot and were in communication with those accused of the murder yet nothing was done to stop it taking place.
MSF launched its first projects in Haiti in 1991, carrying out emergency programs during natural disasters and crisis situations.
Immediately following the January 2010 earthquake, the organization undertook the largest emergency intervention in its history, treating 358,000 people, performing 16,570 operations and assisting at 15,100 births over a 10-month period.
During the cholera epidemic that began in October 2010, MSF set up operations on an unprecedented scale. At the height of the crisis, some 4,000 health care providers were working at more than 75 facilities in Haiti. Nearly 170,000 patients with cholera symptoms were treated between October 2010 and November 2011, and MSF has a large-scale emergency preparation and rapid treatment plan in place in case of another widespread outbreak.
Read more about what MSF is doing in Haiti now.
Photo: Haiti 2010 © Aurelie Lachant/MSF
Send an e-letter through United4Iran.
Your Excellency:
I write to express concern about a new bill before the Iranian Parliament that contravenes Iran’s international human rights obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. I am especially concerned about provisions within the new penal code that violate the rights of Iranian citizens through:
• Continued harsh penalties for minors with girls expected to assume adult responsibilities for criminal actions from the age of nine, and boys from the age of fifteen;
• Continued use of corporal punishment such as stoning and lashing considered cruel, inhuman, and degrading;
• Increased penalties for the charge of “action against national security,” which is routinely used to silence and imprison dissidents; and
• Continued discriminatory laws against women and religious minorities.
The Iranian government should immediately start the long overdue process of revising its laws to meet international human rights standards, as called for by the UN Secretary General, the UN Special Rapporteur, the UN General Assembly, and the UN Human Rights Council. This new penal code ignores the recommendations made by the international community to Iran during its Universal Periodic Review in February 2010. This includes recommendations accepted by the government to ensure its laws were in conformity with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which Iran is a state party.
I strongly urge you to reject this bill and to send it back for revisions that ensure Iran’s laws are in accordance with its international legal obligations and commitments.
Sincerely,
AL JAZEERA ENLGISH - INSIDE SYRIA: IS THE ARAB LEAGUE MISSION DOOMED TO FAIL.
How effective is the Arab League mission? Has the Syrian regime managed to continue their heavy handed crackdown on protesters despite Arab League’s presence on the ground? Guests: Elias Hanna; As’ad Abukhalil; and Ahed al-Hendi.
(via ajfaultlines)
Ken Clarke recently announced plans to end the right to compensation for prisoners injured in custody. This sends a clear message that prisoners have no right to speak up against violence in prison - even, in fact, that they deserve it. But isn’t that what we call torture? We’ve all heard of Abu Ghraib - the sexual abuse, the hoodings, the murders. We used this as a barometer against which to define our own culture, to underline our moral superiority, to rail against crimes committed far away from us. But it was only their distance which defined for us so clearly what was wrong.
The reality of prison violence is that the most vulnerable are also the most likely to be attacked. From 2003-2008, the Howard League (a charity which campaigns for reform of the prison system) reported a 31% increase in prison violence, with young people - some as young as 12 - the most likely to be affected. Self harm in particular has increased among women, many of whom have been forcibly separated from their children. In fact, imprisonment leaves a shocking 17,000 children a year without a mother; 6,000 of this number are simply ‘forgotten’ - their whereabouts unknown. The Institute for Race Relations’ roll call of black and ethnic minority deaths in custody reads like an indictment of the justice system, written in the blood of some of society’s most vulnerable people: Mohammed Bin Duhri, found hanged in Belmarsh prison; officers suspended after allegedly filing reports saying he was alive when he was already dead. And perhaps most heartbreaking is the case of Adam Rickwood, a 14 year old who hung himself with his shoelaces in a secure prison unit.
These stories are overlooked because they force us to answer uncomfortable questions about a justice system which we thought fair and infallible, making us reconsider previously held notions about those we considered inhuman and deserving of pain. In the forgotten world inside prisons, such assaults are not only common but institutionally condoned, as courts repeatedly refuse to prosecute prison authorities who abuse or neglect prisoners, and families’ calls to reopen inquests are ignored.
Anastasia Richardson - Being behind bars doesn’t negate your humanity (via Huffington Post)
Iraq: A country in shambles
As a daily drumbeat of violence continues to reverberate across Iraq, people here continue to struggle to find some sense of normality, a task made increasingly difficult due to ongoing violence and the lack of both water and electricity.
According to a March 2011 report by the UN’s Inter-Agency Information and Analysis Unit, one in five Iraqi households use an unsafe source of drinking water, and another 16 per cent report daily supply problems.
The situation is even worse in rural areas, where only 43 per cent have access to safe drinking water, and water available for agriculture is usually scarce and of very poor quality. These facts have led more Iraqis than ever to leave rural communities in search of water and work in the cities, further compounding already existing problems there.
Street side electricity generators are now a common sight around Iraq’s capital city, where the average home receives between four and eight hours of electricity each day. Some areas, such as Sadr City, receive an average of less than five hours a day, with some portions of the area receiving a mere hour to two a day - and sometimes none at all.
Nabil Toufiq is a generator operator who serves 220 homes for 12 hours each day. “We buy our diesel on the black market, not from the government,” he told Al Jazeera. “We expect this business to continue forever because government corruption prevents them from fixing our problems.”
Turn off one of the main thoroughfares through the area and one quickly finds dirt roads with sewage streaming down the gutters. While water-borne diseases and diarrhoea are common across Baghdad, they are rampant in Sadr City, where the lack of potable water, coupled with raw sewage flowing through many of the streets, make the spread of disease inevitable.
According to the UNDP, Iraq has a poverty rate of 23 per cent, which means roughly six million Iraqis are plagued by poverty and hunger, despite the recent increase in Iraq’s oil exports. Iraq’s Ministry of Planning has also announced that the country needed some $6.8bn to reduce the level of poverty in the country.
Gheda Karam sells dates and fruits. Her husband was paralysed during the Iraq-Iran war, and the benefits they get from the government for his disability are not enough.
“My family is suffering too much,” she told Al Jazeera. “Even yesterday we did not eat dinner. We are 20 of us in an old house, and I’m the only one with work.”
But nowhere is the lack of economic growth more evident than in Baghdad. According to the Central Bank of Iraq, unemployment and “under-employment” are both at 46 per cent, although many in Iraq feel this is a generously low estimate.
Iraq continues to have a cash economy; meaning there are no credit cards, almost no checking accounts, no transfer of electronic funds, and only a few ATMs.
Iraq lacks a functioning postal service, has no public transportation, nor a national airline - and most goods sold in Iraq are imported.
Iraq is ranked the eighth most corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International. That means Iraq is tied with Haiti, and just barely less corrupt than Afghanistan.
Recent spates of coordinated bombings that have killed more than 100 Iraqis and wounded more than 200 in the past few weeks are evidence of Iraq’s current security situation.
As Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki said recently, there can be no security without political stability. Despite most of the daily violence in Iraq having long since fallen from the headlines, reports are constant and blood continues to flow.
Dahr Jamail, Al Jazeera - Read More
After a recent typhoon caused severe, and in some cases fatal, flooding on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) team began providing emergency medical assistance to people whose houses were destroyed and who are now living in evacuation centers.
Photo: Philippines 2011 © Pauline Busson/MSF
(via mohandasgandhi)
This organization is saving Child Soldiers that have been kidnapped from their homes in Uganda and forced to fight. Help stop this and please spread the word <3. Truly a great organization that really shows one person can make a difference.
Hunger in the News
wfp:
More Than 9 million In Sahel Face Food Crisis —Reuters
More than 9 million people in five countries in Africa’s Sahel region face food crisis next year, following low rainfall, poor harvests, high food prices, and a drop in remittances from migrants. WFP estimates between 5-7 million people are affected by what it called climate-related crisis and are in need of urgent assistance, with at least a million children in the Sahel facing malnutrition next year.
Ivory Coast: Refugees Still Fear Returning Home —Global Post
8 months after this country’s post-election violence ended, hundreds of thousands of people still have not returned home. Many risk hunger if they leave a camp without humanitarian assistance. WFP is therefore offering food not only to those displaced but also to returnees.
Greening Latin America: Investing In Nature For A Sustainable Future —The Huffington Post
Some of Latin America’s leading agricultural businesses from sugarcane growers to ranchers to soy producers understand that improving sustainability has a positive impact on their bottom line, local communities and the lands and waters on which all life depends.
The United States has helped to save millions of lives through the support of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria.
But right now, Congress is holding meetings on cuts to the White House’s 2012 budget request for global health funding. Their decisions could jeopardize the lives of millions of people who need access to treatment for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.
Photo: Kenya 2005 © Brendan Bannon
