Category Archives: human rights

Rudy Giuliani Goes Trolling: Harass The Homeless For Their Own Good!: Gothamist

Let’s put aside Giuliani’s transparent hypocrisy and personal deficiencies for a moment and focus on the premise of the article, which is right there in its headline: “De Blasio’s Progressivism Created City’s Homeless Crisis.”This is a lie.This is a lie that has already been debunked several times. In 2013, during the last year of Bloomberg’s administration, NYC had more homeless people than it had in decades. During his whole final term, from January 2010 through December 2013, “the monthly average number of families with children in the city’s shelter system grew 20 percent. The number of adult families rose 46 percent and the number of single adults climbed 38 percent.”As the de Blasio administration has pointed out, imprisoning panhandlers doesn’t exactly solve the homeless problem in the long run. “Instead of ‘getting rid’ of people, Mayor de Blasio wants to implement long-term solutions to homelessness, building new shelters, providing supportive services and ensuring the mentally ill homeless receive the care they need,” de Blasio spokeswoman Karen Hinton said in a statement.

Source: Rudy Giuliani Goes Trolling: Harass The Homeless For Their Own Good!: Gothamist

Muslims to be banned from Ibrahimi mosque for six days due to Jewish celebrations | PNN

Israeli Occupation Authorities on Tuesday have announced that they will close the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron’s old city for the Muslim worshipers, for six days during September, under the pretext of Jewish occasions.Head of the mosque, Munther Abul-Feelat in a press release said that Israeli authorities decided to close down the mosque for 14, 15, 17, 23, 29 and 30 September, for Jewish celebrations, where only settlers will be allowed to enter it.Abul-Feelat added that IOF prevented calling the Adaan (call for prayers) for 51 times during August.The mosque is regularly closed down by Israeli forces under the same pretext, but Jewish settlers are given full privilege to break into the mosque whenever desired.IOF set checkpoints on the entrances of the mosque and worshipers are fully inspected on the gates.

Source: Muslims to be banned from Ibrahimi mosque for six days due to Jewish celebrations | PNN

An ‘Appeal to Affection and Empathy’: Barcelona’s Mayor Wants Spain’s Cities to Welcome Refugees · Global Voices

she also thanked all the families who offered their homes as shelters, whose solidarity “dignifies our city,” and announced that her council will start working on a project very soon, creating “a volunteer families database” and “organizing networks for sheltering and assisting refugees.”She finished by highlighting the human lives behind the refugee quotas with which European governments seem to be bargaining, and the responsibility of cities, families, and citizens to take action:Translation Original QuoteIn Turkey, Greece, or Lebanon they are taking in millions of refugees, [but in] Spain [it’s] barely 2,000, in spite of having many more resources. These are no quotas: they are human lives. And if states refuse to understand this, [then] here we are, the cities and the citizens, ready to take action. Because yes, we can… and we must.

Source: An ‘Appeal to Affection and Empathy’: Barcelona’s Mayor Wants Spain’s Cities to Welcome Refugees · Global Voices

Moving Company Helps People Escape Abusive Relationships, Free Of Charge: LAist

Meathead Movers was founded in 1997 by two brothers, Aaron and Evan Steed, when they were in high school. They called themselves ‘Meathead Movers’ because they enjoyed playing sports and lifting weights. They’ve partnered with seven area shelters where they help victims of domestic abuse get out of those relationships for good.Good Shepherd, a transitional domestic violence shelter for women and children, is one such partner. Kathleen Buczko, Good Shepherd’s Director of Institutional Advancement, told LAist that Meathead Movers will move their client’s belongings from the transitional housing to their new, permanent housing “after their healing is complete.” With other shelters, Meathead Movers will go to homes where men or women are living with abusive partners and move them from that home to a shelter.”We know how hard it is to pack up someone’s life and move it to a new location, but it’s unimaginable to think about a woman and her children trying to pack up all their belongings and flee before the abuser returns home,” CEO Aaron Steed said in a statement.

Source: Moving Company Helps People Escape Abusive Relationships, Free Of Charge: LAist

A look at Japan′s anti-government protests | Asia | DW.COM | 04.09.2015

Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the parliament building in Tokyo on Sunday, while as many as 300 other protests took place across the country on the same day, manifestations of the public’s displeasure with the legislation presently being debated in the Diet. A vote on the new laws could take place in the Diet as soon as September 14.And while privately they admit that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s overwhelming majority in the Diet means that it is inevitable that it will ram through security bills that they believe trample across the nation’s pacifist constitution, the demonstrators insist this is just the start of their campaign.

Source: A look at Japan′s anti-government protests | Asia | DW.COM | 04.09.2015

Danish tourists helping refugees in Greece – The Local

Danish tour operator Spies and Swedish partner Ving have reported that despite a slow start, their offer to allow tourists to take up to 20 additional kilos of goods to Greece has recently caught-on with Danish and Swedish tourists.  The scheme allows all customers flying out of Copenhagen Airport and Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport and Copenhagen Airport in Denmark to Kos and Lesbos on flights operated by Thomas Cook Airlines Scandinavia.

Source: Danish tourists helping refugees in Greece – The Local

Ecuador’s Indigenous Uprising: State of Emergency Declared as Volcano Erupts and Indigenous Protests Engulf the Streets

On Aug. 13, an estimated 10,000 protesters converged on Quito where they surrounded the Government Palace in the Plaza de Santo Domingo. The protest was peaceful until it was met with overwhelming police force after allegedly being infiltrated by supporters of President Correa. After being released from detention, Salvador Quishpe, speaking to reporters in a ripped shirt that was covered in black dust and dirt, commented that the police “Dragged me, they hit me, they humiliated me.” Just prior to the altercation, he was peacefully beating his drum at the head of the march.

Carlos Perez Guartambel was also beaten and detained by the police along with his partner, Manuela Picq, the French Brazilian journalist for Aljazeera and contributor to Intercontinental Cry. Carlos Perez told Intercontinental Cry, “I am still bruised over my left eye where the police kicked me in the head, hit me with their batons and punched me, and my partner also suffered aggressions and was forced out of the country.”

The beating that Manuela Picq received from the police was severe enough to send her to a hospital for medical treatment. While friends kept vigil in the waiting room, the police arrived to remove her from her hospital bed. At the time, her friends shouted, “They do not have an arrest warrant, this is a kidnap.”

via Ecuador’s Indigenous Uprising: State of Emergency Declared as Volcano Erupts and Indigenous Protests Engulf the Streets.

Jeb Bush Visita la Frontera – The New York Times

It may be time to offer this forlorn candidate some free advice. Although if he really is the smarter Bush, he knows these things already:

1. He should never let himself say the words “anchor babies” ever again. He got in trouble for using that derogatory reference to the children of unauthorized immigrants in passing, in an interview, then dug himself a hole by defending his use of it. On Monday, he dug deeper. He tried to explain that he had been talking about “Asian people” who arrive on tourist visas through organized schemes to give birth to American babies on American soil.

Though the phenomenon is real, Mr. Bush was blasted by Asian-American groups for repeating the slur. And, astoundingly, he handed Mr. Trump the opportunity to send out tweets like this: “In a clumsy move to get out of his ‘anchor babies’ dilemma, where he signed that he would not use the term and now uses it, he blamed ASIANS.”

It was such an unnecessary battle to wade into — maternity tourism is not what Mr. Trump and his enablers on the restrictionist right are talking about. When they say “anchor babies,” they are talking about the browning of America, with its growing Latino population, and recasting it as a sinister plot by child-rearing Mexicans. They want to upend the 14thAmendment, and the country’s family-based immigration laws, to keep the population as white as can be. Maternity tourism by middle-class foreigners is a separate, much smaller issue; changing the Constitution to stop it, as one immigrant rights advocate once put it, is like killing a fly with an Uzi.

via Jeb Bush Visita la Frontera – The New York Times.