Category Archives: human rights

Health agencies say drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis remain a killer in Europe | News | DW.DE | 17.03.2015

As many as 1,000 people a day contract tuberculosis and newer, more drug-resistant strains mean the disease is becoming more difficult to treat.

“MDR-TB (multi-drug resistant TB) is still ravaging the European region, making it the most affected area of the entire world,” Zsuzsanna Jakab, the World Health Organization’s regional director, said Tuesday.

Globally, TB in different strains killed around 1.5 million people in 2013 and the WHO warned last year of “crisis levels” of MDR-TB.

The latest report – a collaboration between the WHO and European Center for Disease Prevention and Control – found infection rates falling in some high-priority countries, while the disease is fighting back in other low-incidence countries.

via Health agencies say drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis remain a killer in Europe | News | DW.DE | 17.03.2015.

The biggest privatisation in NHS history: why we had to blow the whistle | Kate Godfrey | Comment is free | The Guardian

Not only was there no formal consultation, but local patients were meant to get no say on this contract at all. The original plan was to sign the deal in March – before people could have their say at the polls. Labour has said it will not let the project go ahead.

The campaign group I work with – Cancer Not For Profit – fought for more time. When the awarding of the contract was put back until June, we thought that we had won a small victory.

Our source heard differently. The project wasn’t delayed, they were told, but simply hushed up. The political implications of pushing through the biggest privatisation in NHS history two months before a general election were too serious. It had to move forward with speed, and if the contract lacked benchmarks or risk management, forget it. It could all be resolved later. (It is the essence of contract law that weaknesses are generally not resolved later.) The only thing being delayed until after May was the announcement, which would now be made in June. And then a gamble that a new government couldn’t go back on a contract already awarded.

“I’m going to publish,” I told the source. “Tell me if you don’t want me to publish.” I never heard from them again.

via The biggest privatisation in NHS history: why we had to blow the whistle | Kate Godfrey | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Netanyahu vows wave of Jerusalem settler homes if elected | Maan News Agency

Creepiest sucking up to right-wing radicals seen yet! Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Monday that if reelected he will build thousands of settler homes in East Jerusalem to prevent future concessions to the Palestinians.

Speaking ahead of Tuesday’s general election on a whistle-stop tour of Har Homa, a contentious settlement neighborhood of annexed East Jerusalem, Netanyahu vowed he would never allow the Palestinians to establish a capital in the city’s eastern sector.

“I won’t let that happen. My friends and I in Likud will preserve the unity of Jerusalem,” he said of his ruling right-wing party, vowing to prevent any future division of the city by building thousands of new settler homes.

via Netanyahu vows wave of Jerusalem settler homes if elected | Maan News Agency.

US Neo-Cons – no war against Iran, how about Brazil? Not! You have spilled enough blood for your profits! Brazil: hundreds of thousands of protesters call for Rouseff impeachment | World news | The Guardian

“Brazil does not want and will not be a new Venezuela,” read one. “Nation + Liberty = PT (Workers Party) Out!” declared another.

There was a range of voices. While one flag extolled “Peace and Love”, a sizeable contingent of the crowd expressed support for a return to the military dictatorship that ran the country between 1964 and 1985

Advertisement

“Army, Navy and Air Force. Please save us once again of (sic) communism” read one banner in English. Among those holding it was computer graphic designer Marlon Aymes who said military force was the only way to unseat the Workers Party.

“They are in power for 16 years. That is like a dictatorship,” he said. “In 1964 the military of Brazil took a stand against a president who was close to the Kremlin. Today, the PT is in a group that wants a Bolivarian socialist model across Latin America. Common people are protesting and calling for impeachment, but congress is too corrupt to approve that so we need military intervention.”

via Brazil: hundreds of thousands of protesters call for Rouseff impeachment | World news | The Guardian.

Finding Your Authentic Self Is A Lot Of Bloody Work. | Rebelle Society

Chip away at that deranged ego until you feel your authentic self breathe. Until you hear the voice of your body reverberate through your being with the power that only truth brings.

And if no one else tells you, I am here telling you now. It’s not over. Not even close. And you, in all your finery, in honor of your highest self, you chose this.

You chose not to be satiated by the status quo. You chose to have vision. You chose to write yourself the greatest narrative ever written and live up to it through the bare-knuckle grazes and the depths of existential despair.

You chose this because it’s worth it. It’s worth it to keep going through the best and the worst because in the end you emerge.

via Finding Your Authentic Self Is A Lot Of Bloody Work. | Rebelle Society.

Mexican mayoral candidate reportedly decapitated – body found on dirt road | World news | The Guardian

The body of a woman running for election as mayor of a small Mexican town has been discovered after she was kidnapped and reportedly decapitated in the same region where 43 student teachers disappeared last year.

Aidé Nava’s body was found on a dirt road in the beleaguered Mexican state of Guerrero on Tuesday night, hours after she was abducted by a group of armed men, Guerrero’s chief prosecutor Miguel Angel Godínez told Milenio TV.

via Mexican mayoral candidate reportedly decapitated – body found on dirt road | World news | The Guardian.

With Plan to Walk Across DMZ, Women Aim for Peace in Korea – NYTimes.com

Suzy Kim, a professor of Korean history at Rutgers University who is another main organizer, said the group had yet to hear anything from the South Korean government side. South Korean officials declined to comment on the proposal Wednesday.

The group’s intent is to walk across the DMZ, from North to South, on May 24, International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament.

Ms. Kim credited the original idea to Ms. Ahn, who founded a group called Women De-Militarize the Zone a few years ago. “She had been thinking of how neglected the women’s role had been” in attempting to solve the Korean impasse, Ms. Kim said.

Ms. Ahn’s website, WomenCrossDMZ.org, said the planned walk was meant as a “symbolic act of peace.”

Thirty female peace activists from around the world are the core group of walkers. They include Ms. Steinem’s fellow honorary co-chairwoman, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, a 1976 Nobel Peace laureate from Northern Ireland, who helped organize enormous peace demonstrations, mostly of women, that crossed sectarian lines and helped end the bloodshed there.

Another organizer, Leymah Gbowee, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her work in leading a women’s peace movement that brought an end to civil war in Liberia in 2003 and led to the eventual exile, and successful war-crimes prosecution, of President Charles G. Taylor.

Ms. Kim acknowledged that the currently high level of North-South hostility, coupled with the North’s regular denunciations of the United States, the South’s principal ally, was “not a climate to achieve an agreement” to replace the armistice.

“On the other hand, the kind of deadlock we’re in makes it all the more important and necessary in not being O.K. with the status quo,” she said.

via With Plan to Walk Across DMZ, Women Aim for Peace in Korea – NYTimes.com.

SPIEGEL Interview with Greek Prime Minister Tsipras – SPIEGEL ONLINE

Tspiras: That is why we need to put these four months to good use. Europe is facing a dilemma: One either accepts the demands of the people in the south, who have suffered a lot under austerity, and correct the course — or one reacts arrogantly and punitively. If that were to happen, Greece would gradually suffocate. That, though, would no longer just present a financial danger, but also a political one.

SPIEGEL: For whom?

Tsipras: The growing civil movement for a change of course in the south would then become an anti-European current. By punishing Syriza in Greece, you do not slow the dynamic of Podemos in Spain — instead you compel it to become anti-European. By doing so, you strengthen Beppe Grillo in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France — and opponents of the European Union like Nigel Farage in Britain will be very, very pleased.

via SPIEGEL Interview with Greek Prime Minister Tsipras – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

From India and Turkey to Oxford, we live in a perpetual state of war against women | Suzanne Moore | Comment is free | The Guardian

The war against women is waged routinely and globally. Equality of the most basic kind cannot exist when a woman’s life and her words are always worth less than a man’s. But in the darkness of the night, what haunts us are not broken systems but the faces of the broken girls. So, so many. All the time.

via From India and Turkey to Oxford, we live in a perpetual state of war against women | Suzanne Moore | Comment is free | The Guardian.