All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Ebola spread to Goma triggers new emergency talks, cases top 2,500

big oops – bigger than expected

Goma DRC
Lisa Schnirring | News Editor | CIDRAP News
Jul 15, 2019

Also, a high-level meeting was held in Geneva today to assess the latest developments and build donor support.

‘Police officers demanded to see my books’: Elif Shafak on Turkey’s war on free-speech

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The author once put on trial for ‘insulting Turkishness’ explains why writers, academics and especially women, face escalating hostility in Erdoğan’s Turkey

One day two months ago I woke up to thousands of abusive messages on Turkish social media, many of them generated by bots and trolls. Sentences had been plucked from one of my novels, The Gaze, and were being circulated by people demanding fiction writers be put on trial for “obscenity”. My new novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, was also targeted. Both books explore difficult subjects – sexual harassment, gender violence and child abuse – and I was far from the only writer targeted in this way. Soon the hysteria turned into a kind of digital lynching of Turkish authors who had even slightly touched on similar issues in their novels and short stories.

I received a distressed call from my Turkish publisher the same week, informing me that civilian police officers had come to the office demanding to see a number of books. Not only my fiction but titles by Duygu Asena, a leading feminist who died in 2006. The books were taken to the prosecutor’s office to be investigated.

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Donald Trump’s grandfather wrote letter begging not to be deported. Here it is | The Independent

More than a 100 years later, his grandson, Donald Trump, imposed new immigration rules that would have kept his grandfather out of the US.  The Trump administration’s hardline immigration stance has also set precedent for the First Lady Melania Trump to be deported.  Meanwhile, deportation raids in the US which are part of a crackdown by the Trump administration on all undocumented immigrants have led to a increase in arrests of immigrants who do not have criminal records.  In the latest deportation sweep, immigration officers arrested 650 people in communities across the US over a four-day span in July. Among them, 520 had no criminal records.  In June, President Trump reversed on his campaign promise to deport immigrants’ children, known as “Dreamers”, but their parents could still be sent back to their home countries.

Source: Donald Trump’s grandfather wrote letter begging not to be deported. Here it is | The Independent

Israel minister under fire for gay conversion therapy support | News | DW | 14.07.2019

Peretz also caused outrage earlier this month over reported comments to a cabinet meeting. Israel’s Channel 13 reported that he told ministers that Jewish intermarriage and assimilation, particularly in North America, are like a “second Holocaust.”

Source: Israel minister under fire for gay conversion therapy support | News | DW | 14.07.2019

Scarlett Johansson: comments on ‘authentic casting’ taken out of context | Film | The Guardian

On Saturday, Johansson said those comments were subsequently edited in other publications for “clickbait”. “I personally feel that, in an ideal world, any actor should be able to play anybody and Art, in all forms, should be immune to political correctness,” she said in a statement. “I recognize that in reality, there is a wide spread discrepancy amongst my industry that favors Caucasian, cisgender actors and that not every actor has been given the same opportunities that I have been privileged to.”

Source: Scarlett Johansson: comments on ‘authentic casting’ taken out of context | Film | The Guardian

Inoreader – Donald Trump tells US congresswomen to go back to where they came from

The US President tells a number of prominent Democratic congresswomen to go back to the “totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”, despite them all being American citizens and all but one being born in the US.

Source: Inoreader – Donald Trump tells US congresswomen to go back to where they came from