Category Archives: human rights

Zika virus found in Florida blood bank, mosquitoes | CIDRAP

Despite increased surveillance, spraying, and testing, Florida is still experiencing signs of widening Zika virus transmission, based on positive blood bank samples and detection of another positive mosquito pool.Also, Public Health England found Asian Tiger mosquito eggs in southeast England, a first for that country.Pool, blood bank detectionsAccording to the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, an eighth pool of mosquitoes has tested positive for Zika virus in Miami Beach, one of two active transmission zones in Miami-Dade County. The positive sample was from a trap located at 1236 Drexel Ave in Miami Beach.Despite testing 5,400 mosquito samples across the state, all eight positive traps have come from Miami Beach. According to an online statement, the department said “Miami-Dade County’s Mosquito Control team will continue to conduct inspections to reduce mosquito breeding and perform spray treatments as necessary in a minimum of 200-yard radius around the trap location.”In addition to the positive mosquito pool, a Seattle Times story yesterday confirmed that Zika virus had been found in a few units of donated blood in Florida. The Food and Drug Administration confirmed this discovery but did not say how many units had been detected.In July, blood donations stopped in Broward and Miami-Dade counties until Zika testing began. Earlier this year, it was estimated that 1% of all blood donations in Puerto Rico were positive for Zika virus, and many have suggested that a similar trend will be seen in Florida.In August, FDA officials urged at-risk states (Florida, Texas) to begin testing blood bank donations for Zika virus.

Source: Zika virus found in Florida blood bank, mosquitoes | CIDRAP

Donald Trump Reveals Evangelical Rifts That Could Shape Politics for Years – The New York Times

When Jen Hatmaker speaks to stadiums full of Christian women, she regales them with stories about her five children and her garden back in Austin, Tex. — and stays away from politics. But recently she took to Facebook and Instagram to blast Donald J. Trump as a “national disgrace,” and remind her legions of followers that there are other names on the ballot in November.“Trump has consistently normalized violence, sexual deviance, bigotry and hate speech,” she said in an email interview. “I wouldn’t accept this from my seventh-grade son, much less from a potential leader of the free world.”

Source: Donald Trump Reveals Evangelical Rifts That Could Shape Politics for Years – The New York Times

Inside Donald Trump’s echo chamber of conspiracies, grievances and vitriol – The Washington Post

In the presidential campaign’s home stretch, Donald Trump is fully inhabiting his own echo chamber. The Republican nominee has turned inward, increasingly isolated from the country’s mainstream and leaders of his own party, and determined to rouse his most fervent supporters with dire warnings that their populist movement could fall prey to dark and collusive forces.This is a campaign right out of Breitbart, the incendiary conservative website run until recently by Stephen K. Bannon, now the Trump campaign’s chief executive — and it is an act of retaliation.A turbulent few weeks punctuated by allegations of sexual harassment have left Trump trailing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in nearly every swing state. Trump’s gamble is that igniting his army of working-class whites could do more to put him in contention than any sort of broad, tempered appeal to undecided voters.The execution has been volatile. Since announcing last week that “the shackles have been taken off me,” Trump, bolstered by allies on talk radio and social media, has been creating an alternate reality — one full of innuendo about Clinton, tirades about the unfair news media and prophecies of Trump’s imminent triumph.Donald Trump’s long list of conspiracy theories Play Video2:52Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump believes there’s a global conspiracy to stop him from becoming president – but it’s not the first time he’s pushed unfounded theories. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)The candidate once omnipresent across the “mainstream media” these days largely limits his interviews to the safe harbor of the opinion shows on Fox News, and most of them are with Sean Hannity, a Trump supporter and informal counselor.[Trump says groping allegations are part of a global conspiracy to help Clinton]Many Republicans see the Trump campaign’s latest incarnation as a mirror into the psyche of their party’s restive base: pulsating with grievance and vitriol, unmoored from conservative orthodoxy, and deeply suspicious of the fast-changing culture and the consequences of globalization.

Source: Inside Donald Trump’s echo chamber of conspiracies, grievances and vitriol – The Washington Post

Fox News Host Turns Against Network & GOP LIVE On Air: ‘I’m Done!’ (VIDEO)

 

Indicating Ben Carson as one of the worst offenders, Perino said that she was furious with them defending Donald Trump’s long history of sexually assaulting and harassing women. Recently, a number of women have complained that the Republican nominee has displayed sexually aggressive behavior toward them, while tapes of Donald Trump bragging about molesting female acquaintances have been released, making unseemly remarks about underage girls, and admitting that he was a sexual predator have come to light in recent weeks. The Republican nominee settled a sexual harassment suit filed by Jill Harth back in 1997, but other women have come forward recently, including one that claimed that Donald Trump raped her when she was 13 years old.After two of the other panel members joked that her mic was going to be cut off because of these statements, Perino said:‘Yeah, because women should be seen and not heard, apparently.‘After 20 years of defending these guys, done.’

Source: Fox News Host Turns Against Network & GOP LIVE On Air: ‘I’m Done!’ (VIDEO)

Newsweek proves that WikiLeaks is leaking phony “Hillary Clinton emails” to try to hurt her

Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald was in the process of figuring out that the key email in question didn’t really come from Blumenthal. How did Eichenwald figure it out? He realized that the email attributed to Blumenthal was actually something that he himself had written. In other words WikiLeaks took a journalist’s words that were critical of Hillary Clinton and falsified them to make it appear that those words had come from within the Clinton camp itself. This represents absolutely proof that WikiLeaks is in fact leaking phony “Hillary Clinton emails” in an attempt to make her look bad. Or as Eichenwald puts it, “WikiLeaks is compromised.”

Source: Newsweek proves that WikiLeaks is leaking phony “Hillary Clinton emails” to try to hurt her

The caliphate′s cubs: ′Islamic State′ and child soldiers | Middle East | DW.COM | 15.10.2016

The increased appearance of child suicide bombers appears to coincide with IS losing more and more territory and fighters. American military sources say that the group lost 45,000 fighters in two years and has only some 15,000 left. The operation for the liberation of the IS’ capitals of Mosul and Raqqa is underway and over 50 percent of IS-held territories in Iraq have been liberated.To mask the defeat, IS has increased its bomb attacks using trucks. Pictures posted afterwards of the drivers show that many of them are teenagers.Sources say that as many as 60 percent of the IS fighters are under 18. Kirkuk police chief Sarhad Qadir thinks IS is playing its last card. “They know they will be defeated,” he says.

Source: The caliphate′s cubs: ′Islamic State′ and child soldiers | Middle East | DW.COM | 15.10.2016

Hate speech flourishes on Norwegian ministers’ Facebook pages – The Local

In the comments on the Facebook pages of two government ministers from the anti-immigration Progress Party, immigrants are called monkeys, Africans are “birthing machines” and there is implied support for “civil war”.Some of the comments have been allowed to stay on the Facebook pages of Integration Minister Sylvi Listhaug and Fisheries Minister Per Sandberg for weeks, without the ministers or their staff members deleting them.  “It is clearly hate speech. I am surprised that kind of stuff remains on key politicians’ Facebook pages. It helps to reinforce hatred [and] I think it is horrifying,” Anne Birgitta Nilsen, a professor and the author of the book ‘Hatprat’ (Hate Speech), said.

Source: Hate speech flourishes on Norwegian ministers’ Facebook pages – The Local

Trump Accuses Clinton of Guiding Global Elite Against U.S. Working Class – The New York Times – Translation: German-American Trump uses anti-semitic code words and themes to gain advantage

“Mr. Trump focused on the very issues and themes that obsess conspiratorial anti-Semites: They believe that there is an elite group of Jews who control the media, the government, and banking, and who are trying to destroy white America,” he said. “They also believe that most of Hillary Clinton’s donors are Jewish.”The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Others drew a more direct comparison between Mr. Trump’s words and those of anti-Semites.In the speech, Mr. Trump also accused the “Clinton machine” of wielding control over the news media, as well.“The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media, the press,” he said to jeers from the audience.While the allegations were aimed at Mrs. Clinton, who is a Methodist, Jews have long been accused of conspiring to control institutions like banks and the media in order to amass wealth and power.In 1931, for example, the author A. N. Field described the creation of the American Federal Reserve as the moment the “German-Jew engine of control” enslaved the United States, according to the Anti-Defamation League. That conspiracy theory has survived the ensuing decades and, even today, such anti-Semitic beliefs remain prevalent around the world, according to A.D.L. polling.In West Palm Beach on Thursday, reporters covering Mr. Trump returned to a table reserved for the press to find a sign bearing a swastika and the word “MEDIA” scrawled on it, Jim Acosta, a senior CNN White House correspondent, reported.

Source: Trump Accuses Clinton of Guiding Global Elite Against U.S. Working Class – The New York Times

‘True Scale’ of India’s Tuberculosis Problem: 2.8 Million New Cases – The New York Times

Finally coming to terms with the enormity of its tuberculosis problem, India is preparing a radical overhaul and expansion of its national treatment program to fight an affliction that kills more adults worldwide than any other infectious disease.The severity of the matter was underscored on Thursday when the World Health Organization substantially increased its estimate of the number of new patients with TB in India, to 2.8 million in 2015, compared with 2.2 million in 2014 — more than in any other country in the world and more than a quarter of the world total.

Source: ‘True Scale’ of India’s Tuberculosis Problem: 2.8 Million New Cases – The New York Times

How Nazi terminology is creeping back into politics – The Local – “Proof that death patterns can be revived – problem is that while the patterns may be strategic, mass death is its predetermined end.”

Some politicians too have been using racially charged words such as “völkisch”, a term meaning “ethnic” but used by the Nazis to describe people belonging to the superior German race, and “Umvolkung” – the fascist idea of replacing racially inferior populations with the German people.The leader of the anti-migrant right-wing populist party AfD, Frauke Petry, who has never been shy of controversy, last month suggested that “völkisch” be rehabilitated and wiped of its negative connotation.”I do not use this term myself, but I don’t agree that it should only be used in a negative context,” she told Die Welt daily, drawing a chorus of condemnation.Die Zeit columnist Kai Biermann pointed out that “the term völkisch was a synonym for extreme nationalism and racism. It is, until today, a symbol for Nazism and its ideology to exterminate and murder everyone who is not German.” The columnist charged that Petry had dug up the term because “it expresses the wish to reject everything that does not belong to one’s people”. “It stirs up the fear that too many foreign people are coming who can change the status quo,” he wrote. A politician belonging to Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union went on to also use the term “Umvolkung”. While the Nazis had used the word to define the Germanization of people in regions seized by the Third Reich, today it is used in the far-right milieu as shorthand for immigration. Bettina Kudla drew fire when she said in a tweet that: “Merkel disputes it … The Umvolkung of Germany has already begun. Action is needed!”

Shift in identity

Hans Kundnani, political analyst at the German Marshall Fund, noted that politicians would not have used these controversial terms two decades ago. “There’s been a shift in German national identity over the last 15 years or so, and I think the use of these terms has reemerged against that backdrop”, he said. What has changed is that there has been a “resurgence in the collective memory of Germans as victims” in World War II.

Source: How Nazi terminology is creeping back into politics – The Local