Category Archives: human rights

200 farmers committed suicide in Marathwada, says official – The Times of India

The total number of farmers who committed suicide during the last three months in the eight districts of Marathwada region has crossed 200, official sources said here today.

The main reason behind taking the extreme step is bankruptcy due to loans which cannot be repayed due to crops destroyed by natural calamities.

via 200 farmers committed suicide in Marathwada, says official – The Times of India.

Germans deny signing GOP letter on Iran – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East

Reps. Doug Lamborn, R-Col., and Randy Weber, R-Tx., circulated a letter to world leaders last month that they claimed had been signed by four European lawmakers. Since then, two of the alleged supporters, German parliamentarians Johann Wadephul and Roderich Kiesewetter, have informed Al-Monitor that they were not involved.

“This letter never came to the attention of Dr. Wadephul nor Mr. Kiesewetter and therefore has not been signed by them,” a Wadephul spokeswoman told Al-Monitor via email. The parliamentarian followed up with a formal letter stating he had “at no time signed nor agreed to support” the letter.

via Germans deny signing GOP letter on Iran – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East.

In Four Loops, Marathon Conveys Palestinian Constraints – NYTimes.com

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — The runners looped four times through this city, following a route that took them from the Church of the Nativity, traditionally considered Christ’s birthplace, down Bethlehem’s main avenue and alongside Israel’s looming separation barrier, scrawled with graffiti and blackened from hurled projectiles.

The Palestine Marathon, held last week, is a hemmed-in affair, much like the city where it is run. “In Bethlehem, there’s not a continuous 42 kilometers,” huffed Marwa Younis, 32, as she ran. “You have to run back and forth.”

But that is exactly why the organizers of the Right to Movement: Palestine Marathon chose to stage it here. What better way to draw attention to the constraints Palestinians say they face in their daily lives?

Continue reading the main story

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“We want to send a message that we don’t have the right to movement — we are occupied and have the apartheid wall,” said an organizer, Diala Isid, referring to Israel’s 26-foot-high separation barrier, which surrounds the city on three sides. “So we thought, ‘Let’s make an international marathon.’ ”

via In Four Loops, Marathon Conveys Palestinian Constraints – NYTimes.com.

Research Center Alan Lomax Folk Recordings Free 17,400.

The Sound Recordings catalog comprises over 17,400 digital audio files, beginning with Lomax’s first recordings onto (newly invented) tape in 1946 and tracing his career into the 1990s. In addition to a wide spectrum of musical performances from around the world, it includes stories, jokes, sermons, personal narratives, interviews conducted by Lomax and his associates, and unique ambient artifacts captured in transit from radio broadcasts, sometimes inadvertently, when Alan left the tape machine running. Not a single piece of recorded sound in Lomax’s audio archive has been omitted: meaning that microphone checks, partial performances, and false starts are also included.

This material from Alan Lomax’s independent archive, begun in 1946, which has been digitized and preserved by the Association for Cultural Equity, is distinct from the thousands of earlier recordings on acetate and aluminum discs he made from 1933 to 1942 under the auspices of the Library of Congress. This earlier collection — which includes the famous Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Muddy Waters sessions, as well as Lomax’s prodigious collections made in Haiti and Eastern Kentucky (1937) — is the provenance of the American Folklife Center at the Library. Attempts are being made, however, to digitize some of this rarer material, such as the Haitian recordings, and to make it available in the Sound Recordings catalog. Please check in periodically for updates.

via Research Center.

In One-Woman Show, Arafat Protégée Offers Personal Take on Conflict – NYTimes.com

With that story began the sold-out closing performance last week of the autobiographical one-woman show “Where Can I Find Someone Like You, Ali,” written and performed by the Palestinian writer Raeda Taha and directed by Lina Abyad at the Babel Theater in Beirut.

Ms. Taha’s show has drawn large crowds and critical acclaim since it opened here last month because of its deeply personal and often ironic take on a life shaped by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ms. Taha’s pedigree gives her a rare tie to the Palestinian struggle: her father was a militant killed by Israeli commandos after hijacking an airplane in 1972. Mr. Arafat then virtually adopted her and her sisters, lavishing them with gifts as the daughters of a “martyr.” As an adult, she worked as Mr. Arafat’s press secretary.

via In One-Woman Show, Arafat Protégée Offers Personal Take on Conflict – NYTimes.com.

Greek Study Provides Evidence of Forced Loans to Nazis – SPIEGEL ONLINE

The central question in the report is that of forced loans the Nazi occupiers extorted from the Greek central bank beginning in 1941. Should requests for repayment of those loans be classified as reparation demands — demands that may have been forfeited with the Two-Plus-Four Treaty of 1990? Or is it a genuine loan that must be paid back? The expert commission analyzed contracts and agreements from the time of the occupation as well as receipts, remittance slips and bank statements.

They found that the forced loans do not fit into the category of classical war reparations. The commission calculated the outstanding German “debt” to the Greek central bank and came to a total sum of $12.8 billion as of December 2014, which would amount to about €11 billion.

As such, at issue between Germany and Greece is no longer just the question as to whether the 115 million deutsche marks paid to the Greek government from 1961 onwards for its peoples’ suffering during the occupation sufficed as legal compensation for the massacres like those in the villages of Distomo and Kalavrita. Now the key issue is whether the successor to the German Reich, the Federal Republic of Germany, is responsible for paying back loans extorted by the Nazi occupiers. There’s some evidence to indicate that this may be the case.

In terms of the amount of the loan debt, the Greek auditors have come to almost the same findings as those of the Nazis’ bookkeepers shortly before the end of the war. Hitler’s auditors estimated 26 days before the war’s end that the “outstanding debt” the Reich owed to Greece at 476 million Reichsmarks.

Auditors in Athens calculated an “open credit line” for the same period of time of around $213 million. They assumed a dollar exchange rate to the Reichsmark of 2:1 and applied an interest escalation clause accepted by the German occupiers that would result in a value of more than €11 billion today.

via Greek Study Provides Evidence of Forced Loans to Nazis – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Death Penalty Focus : Pope Francis Condemns the Death Penalty

Capital punishment “is cruel, inhuman and degrading, as is the anxiety that precedes the moment of execution and the terrible wait between the sentence and the application of the punishment, a ‘torture’ which, in the name of a just process, usually lasts many years and, in awaiting death, leads to sickness and insanity.”

via Death Penalty Focus : Pope Francis Condemns the Death Penalty.

Fail! Settlers enter Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron | Maan News Agency

A group of Israeli settlers entered the Isaac Hall inside the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron on Thursday under armed protection from Israeli forces, witnesses said.

Local sources said that guards attempted to prevent settlers from entering the mosque, but the army facilitated their entrance.

Under an agreement with endowment officials, Jewish visits to Isaac’s Hall are limited to 10 per year.

The agreement came into place after a Brooklyn-born Jewish settler massacred 29 Palestinians in the mosque after opening fire at worshipers in 1994.

The Ibrahimi Mosque is known to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs, and is the site where both faiths believe the Biblical patriarch Abraham is buried.

via Settlers enter Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron | Maan News Agency.

{Haters in} House Judiciary Committee Signs Off on Comprehensive Mass Deportation Plan : Immigration Impact

Almost no one seems to think that deporting 11 million people is a viable strategy. Policy makers from President Obama to Texas Governor Rick Perry have recognized this. A group estimated the costs as $400 to $600 billion, let alone the human costs. As Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said yesterday, “The country has considered and rejected mass deportation or self-deportation… So how can it make any more sense to imprison all of those people?”

At some point, Congress will have to deal with the realities that we can’t and shouldn’t deport 11 million people, and that criminalizing undocumented immigrants will not make us safer. Hopefully that time will come sooner rather than later.

via House Judiciary Committee Signs Off on Comprehensive Mass Deportation Plan : Immigration Impact.