Category Archives: human rights

Here are the faces of L.A. County’s homicide victims – The Homicide Report – Los Angeles Times

Here are the faces of L.A. County’s homicide victimsEach image was captured in a moment — at the DMV for a new license, at graduation, at a wedding, on a sports field, holding a baby. Each life ended violently.Since it started eight years ago, The Homicide Report has had the goal of a story for every victim. Now we are expanding that goal to include a photograph for every victim. So far we’ve gathered pictures of 1,259 victims, about 9% of those killed. Help us do better. If you have a photo of a homicide victim to share, email it to homicidereport@latimes.com.

Source: Here are the faces of L.A. County’s homicide victims – The Homicide Report – Los Angeles Times

Gunman kills patient and employee at Florida hospital | US news | The Guardian (So… I did not find a CNN crew reporting, the President making an announcement, Trump spewing – what’s that mean?)

A gunman entered a Florida hospital through the emergency room early on Sunday, went to the third floor and fatally shot a patient and an employee apparently at random, police said.David Owens, 29, entered Parrish Medical Center at 2am and used a handgun to fatally shoot 88-year-old patient Cynthia Zingsheim and employee Carrie Rouzer, 36, who was sitting with Zingsheim in her room, Titusville police said.Owens left the gun in the room and was tackled by two unarmed security guards as he left, police said.“The bravery they showed was amazing,” Titusville police chief John Lau said.Authorities said they had found no motive for the shooting and no immediate connection between Owens and the women. All lived in Titusville. The shooting “appears to be extremely random,” Brevard County sheriff Wayne Ivey said.Owens was charged with two counts of murder. He was being held without bail at the Brevard County jail.Court records show that in 2011 he was found guilty of battery on a police officer and that twice in 2012 a judge ordered him to undergo a mental health examination. Records show that other arrests for cocaine and marijuana possession and domestic battery were dismissed.No one answered the phone on Sunday at the Brevard County public defender’s office, and it could not be determined if Owens had an attorney.The hospital was reopened.

Source: Gunman kills patient and employee at Florida hospital | US news | The Guardian

We killed Qandeel Baloch – The Ladies Finger

What Qandeel did was represent a changing Pakistan: a Pakistan where a viral celebrity could engage with mainstream media and thus the rest of the country, despite being provocative. We began to witness a nation that was now questioning its own conscience as a result of her growing popularity, presence in TV shows and rise to becoming a household name despite being labelled a ‘slut’.The irony of Qandeel is that she came home for just one week, before leaving for abroad (presumably Dubai) with her parents to seek safety from the death threats she was receiving. Little did she know that the biggest threat to her, as is the case with most women in Pakistan, is the threat at home. Threat from the ones you love and love you back from the ones you grew up and the ones who have known you since you were a baby and the ones who are supposed to protect and nurture you from the hate that is often found swirling around in our toxic society: Your family.Fariha Altaf, tweeted that she spoke to Qandeel the night she was killed and she sounded so happy and excited. Just like that — a woman loved by many, a human with a life of hopes and dreams, was taken away from us. She died at the hands of her brothers for living her life on her own terms.The murder of Qandeel Baloch sends a very frightening message to every woman in Pakistan: WE WILL CONTINUE TO BE KILLED. They will find a reason for all of us, one by one until we can challenge this toxic brand of masculinity and honour.

Source: We killed Qandeel Baloch – The Ladies FingerThe Ladies Finger

Artificial intelligence reveals undiscovered bat carriers of Ebola and other filoviruses | Science Codex

David Hayman of Massey University notes, “The model allows us to move beyond our own biases and find patterns in the data that only a machine can. Instead of predicting where Ebola and other filovirus outbreaks will occur by looking at the last spillover event, it forecasts risk based on the intrinsic traits of filovirus-positive bat species.”Those traits include: early maturity, having more than one pup per year (most bats only have one), offspring that are large at birth, and a tendency to live in large groups. Compared to other bats, filovirus-positive species also have broader geographic ranges that overlap with a higher diversity of mammal species per square kilometer.When data on the world’s 1116 bat species were searched using this filovirus-positive bat profile, machine learning identified new potential hosts based on their traits. Once mapped, these bats were more widely distributed than the team expected. While many potential bat hosts are found in sub-Saharan Africa, they also range across Southeast Asia and Central and South America.Han explains, “Our results corroborate studies in Africa that have predicted the environmental niche of Ebola spans the primary tropical rainforest. But in a departure from past research, we identified several hotspots in Southeast Asia where up to 26 potential reservoir species overlap, notably in Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam, and northeast India.”John Drake of the University of Georgia concludes, “Maps generated by the algorithm can help guide targeted surveillance and virus discovery projects. We suspect there may be other filoviruses waiting to be found. An outstanding question for future work is to investigate why there are so few filovirus spillover events reported for humans and wildlife in Southeast Asia compared to equatorial Africa.”

Source: Artificial intelligence reveals undiscovered bat carriers of Ebola and other filoviruses | Science Codex

Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Dallas | Race Files – Truth is not easy but it opens doors

 

“Was he colored?” That’s what my grandmother would say whenever she heard news about a criminal act. She knew that if the alleged perpetrator were “colored” his criminality would be read not simply as the act of an individual, but as an expression of an ingrained racial tendency. Somehow being Black meant that the actions of every random thief, rapist or murderer who was also Black redounded to you and your people. I imagine most Black families had a version of “Was he colored?” And I wouldn’t be surprised if Muslim American families have an equivalent expression today. Untying the knot of individual culpability and the consequences of racial belonging is nowhere near as straightforward as it might seem.I was on a dance floor on Thursday night, desperately trying to shake off the news from Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights. My phone was in my back pocket and, like an idiot, when it buzzed with an incoming text, I left the dance floor and stepped outside to the news from Dallas. Though the action was still unfolding, I immediately surmised that the shooter was “colored,” and that he had been trained by the U.S. military.It has fallen to President Obama, time and again, to make sense out of the incomprehensible and bind the wounds of a nation apparently bent on self-destruction. In the aftermath of Dallas, Obama quickly condemned the despicable violence of a demented, troubled individual. The president’s intent was clear and laudable. He sought to defuse tensions by definitively asserting that the shooter’s action was not associated with a political movement or a particular organization, that his murderous deeds should in no way be linked to African Americans in general. He struggled to shift the focus from “Was he colored?” to “Clearly he was crazy, right?”But before boxing Micah Johnson up and setting him aside as deranged and demented it’s worth asking a few questions. Honestly, good people, did anybody in their right mind – that is, not troubled or demented – think that the police could continue to pick off Black people at will and on camera without producing a Micah Johnson? And is troubled and demented shorthand for “traumatized by repeated exposure to the graphic depiction of the murder of people who look just like me?” Or for “agonized by the fact that the officers of the law who placed a handcuffed man in the back of a van and snapped his spine in an intentionally “rough ride” were neither held criminally accountable nor labeled troubled and demented?” Or for “depressed beyond imagining and haunted by the ghosts of the men and women whose lives were snatched by the side of the road, down back alleyways, and in precinct stations from one end of the country to the other before the era of cell phone video?” Or for “pierced through the heart by the voice of four-year-old Dae’Anna, comforting her mama?” Because if demented and troubled is shorthand for any of that, then Micah Johnson may have been a lone gunman, but he is far from alone.That whoosh you heard on Friday morning was the sound of people rushing to condemn the Dallas shootings, or to extract condemnations from others. There is, of course, no moral justification for gunning down police officers. And, retaliatory violence aimed at the armed representatives of the state, beyond being a suicidal provocation, also shuts down all avenues for advancing the cause of racial justice. But there is a lot of room for reflection between the cheap polarities of condemn or condone.So here we are, once again, with calls from all quarters for dialogue across the racial divide. But if the long years before the emergence of the various movements for Black lives have taught us anything, it is this: our purported partners in dialogue simply turn their backs and leave the table as soon as the pressure is off. This moment calls for the vigorous defense of our right to continued protest and the intensification and elaboration of multiple movements for Black lives – for the sake of our ancestors and the generations to come. And for the sake of this country that is our home.

Source: Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Dallas | Race Files

Senate impasse postpones Zika funding talks till fall | CIDRAP

Richard Hamburg, interim president and chief executive officer of Trust for America’s Health, a Washington-based public health advocacy group, said in a statement, “By the time Congress returns in a couple of months, the damage to our nation from Zika will likely be irreversible. This failure to act severely hampers the full response that is greatly needed.”He said without additional funding, state and community health departments are on their own and will need to shift money earmarked for other efforts to cover mosquito testing, disease surveillance, and other actions.At the scientific level, the funding gap will also slow work on vaccines, treatment, and new tests, Hamburg said. “While this will undoubtedly have short-term consequences, this failure has the potential to cause drastic future problems as researchers find government an unreliable partner in supporting innovation.”

Source: Senate impasse postpones Zika funding talks till fall | CIDRAP

Fresno police release body-camera footage of fatal shooting of unarmed 19-year-old – LA Times ” It’s so easy, it’s so easy to… shoot ’em down.” Don’t hiccup, belch or … Might sound like a gun shot!

The chief of the Fresno Police Department took the rare step Wednesday of publicly releasing the body-camera video footage of officers fatally shooting an unarmed 19-year-old man last month — a shooting that has generated fierce protests amid a roiling national debate over police brutality.

Source: Fresno police release body-camera footage of fatal shooting of unarmed 19-year-old – LA Times