Category Archives: Viva!

Sri Lankan reform has ‘ground to a halt’ with torture used freely – UN

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Coalition government has failed on promise to repeal Prevention of Terrorism Act

Sri Lanka’s progress towards reform has “virtually ground to a halt” and brutal torture is used with impunity, the UN concludes in a scathing report on the country’s human rights record.

The report, which comes three years after the country appeared to have turned a corner in its history by electing a new coalition government, is published on Monday following a UN visit to Sri Lanka at the request of the government. “None of the measures so far adopted to fulfil Sri Lanka’s transitional justice commitments are adequate to ensure real progress,” it says.

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The NRA’s attempt to deflect blame away from guns for the Parkland shooting just fell apart

The NRA’s attempt to deflect blame away from guns for the Parkland shooting just fell apart:

justinspoliticalcorner:

Cydney Hargis at MMFA: 

National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch dismissed new findings that a school-based discipline program called Promise was not responsible for the Parkland, FL, school shooting after pushing the allegation for months that the program allowed the shooting to happen.    

Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz had been referred to Broward County’s Promise program, an alternative option for students “who have committed a behavioral infraction that would normally lead to a juvenile delinquency arrest” in 2013 after he vandalized a bathroom in an area middle school. Despite claims that referring Cruz to the program contributed to the failures to report his behavior to law enforcement, a commission set up to investigate the mass shooting concluded the program was “irrelevant” to Cruz’s ability to obtain an assault weapon and carry out the massacre.

During the months following the February 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 people dead and 14 others injured, NRA spokesperson and NRATV host Dana Loesch repeatedly shredded the “Obama-era” Promise program during her show, Relentless. During the May 29 edition of her show, Loesch suggested people should protest outside the house of President Barack Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, because it was his “Promise program initiative that assisted this murderer.”

Loesch said “the real story” behind the Parkland shooting is Broward County Superintendent Robert Runcie “worrying about the appearance of complying with an Obama-era Promise program” which ultimately “guaranteed that this murderer’s red flags would being completely overlooked” during the June 1 edition of Relentless. Four days later, she insisted Duncan’s “policies that were implemented that coddled this murderer failed” Parkland students.      

One day after the Miami Herald reported the commission’s findings, Loesch did a segment on the commission’s work that discussed the Promise program but ignored the revelation that it was found to have no causal relationship to the shooting.

[…]

During the July 13 edition of NRATV’s Relentless, Loesch referenced a tweet Runcie wrote in which he echoed the commission’s finding and said she questioned “how much” she believes him. She went on to place blame squarely on the superintendent, saying if the findings are true, “wouldn’t that just mean that it was his own personal incompetency then that contributed to this instead of a bad program? I mean, that seems like it’s worse.”

Schiff: Surveillance warrant docs show that Nunes memo ‘misrepresented and distorted these applications’

Schiff: Surveillance warrant docs show that Nunes memo ‘misrepresented and distorted these applications’:

feelingbluepolitics:

“Schiff said Saturday that while the documents show the FBI’s “legitimate concern” about Page, he said the materials should not have been released during a pending investigation.

“These national security considerations were cast aside by President Trump, whose decision to declassify the Nunes Memo — which misrepresented and distorted these applications — over the fervent opposition of the Department of Justice, was nakedly political and self-interested, and designed to  to interfere with the Special Counsel’s investigation,” the lawmaker said.”

New evidence suggests Inuit knew yarn skills long before Viking contact | CBC News – drop your racism and new truths arise…

Source: New evidence suggests Inuit knew yarn skills long before Viking contact | CBC News

First, the yarn didn’t look like anything she’d seen in years of examining Norse fibres. Second, why would the people of the Arctic — highly skilled clothesmakers — need to learn such a basic technique from anyone else?

“The idea that you would have to learn to spin something from another culture was a bit ludicrous,” she said. “It’s a pretty intuitive thing to do.”

Why mobile phones are NOT a health hazard

If phones are linked to cancer, we’d expect to see a marked uptick in cancer with uptake. Yet we do not. American mobile phone penetration increased from almost nothing in 1992 to practically 100% by 2008 and there is zero indication glioma rates have increased, a finding replicated by numerous other studies.

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An article we published last week about links between mobiles and cancer proved highly controversial. Here a cancer expert and physicist argues that it misrepresented the research and that fears are ill-founded

• Last week’s article: The inconvenient truth about cancer and mobile phones

Last week the Observer published an article by Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie on a disturbing topic – the idea that telecoms giants might collude to suppress evidence that wireless technology causes cancer. The feature was well written, ostensibly well researched, and deeply concerning. Its powerful narrative tapped into rich themes; our deep-seated fears about cancer, corporate greed, and technology’s potentially noxious influence on our health. It spread rapidly across social media – facilitated by the very object on which it cast doubt.

Yet as enthralling as Hertsgaard and Dowie’s narrative might be, it is strewn with rudimentary errors and dubious inferences. As a physicist working in cancer research, I found the authors’ penchant for amplifying claims far beyond that which the evidence allows troubling. And as a scientist deeply invested in public understanding of science, I’ve seen first-hand the damage that scaremongering can do to societal health. While it is tempting to rage into the void, perhaps this episode can serve as a case study in how public understanding of science can be mangled, and what warning signs we might look out for.

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‘A danger to humanity’: Activists block Hungarian PM’s convoy at Yad Vashem

“I am here because I believe Orbán has no reason to be in Yad Vashem,” said Veronica Cohen, a Holocaust survivor born in Hungary. “Because of his anti-humanistic attitude, because of his incitement against refugees. We were once refugees, we are in a sense a nation of refugees, and it is our duty to protect them. He is a danger to humanity.”

“Unfortunately the prime minister of Israel also has very little respect for human life. The new laws passed recently are leading us toward fascism,” Cohen added, as she held a sign reading “Never Again.”

Dozens of demonstrators, including Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors, block Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s convoy outside Israeli Holocaust museum. ‘He is a danger to humanity.’

By Oren Ziv

Dozens of demonstrators blocked Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s motorcade as he left Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, in Jerusalem Thursday, as part of his official visit to the country. The demonstrators were protesting Orbán’s anti-Semitism, as well as his iron-fisted policies toward asylum seekers in his country.

[tmwinpost]

The demonstrators held signs in both Hebrew and Hungarian and yelled the word “shame” while blocking the convoy as it tried to leave the museum. Within minutes the crowd was dispersed by Shin Bet agents and police officers, with the protesters continuing to chant as Orbán planted a tree in The Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations, dedicated to non-Jews who aided Jews during the Holocaust.

Orbán has been waging an anti-Semitic campaign against billionaire George Soros, himself a Hungarian Jew, and has enacted harsh policies against refugees, including by building detention camps and a separation barrier on Hungary’s borders.

“I am here because I believe Orbán has no reason to be in Yad Vashem,” said Veronica Cohen, a Holocaust survivor born in Hungary. “Because of his anti-humanistic attitude, because of his incitement against refugees. We were once refugees, we are in a sense a nation of refugees, and it is our duty to protect them. He is a danger to humanity.”

“Unfortunately the prime minister of Israel also has very little respect for human life. The new laws passed recently are leading us toward fascism,” Cohen added, as she held a sign reading “Never Again.”

“We are protesting against this shameful visit,” said Attorney Eitay Mack, one of the organizers of the action. “Orbán is carrying out an anti-Semitic and racist campaign in Hungary against George Soros. The heads of the Jewish community in Hungary have called it dangerous.”

Mack also spoke about policies that Yad Vashem can enact regarding visits by racist leaders. “Every dictator, every murderer who wants to buy weapons from Israel must come and lay a wreath at Yad Vashem. We saw the head of the junta in Myanmar come here for a visit, only to carry out a genocidal campaign months later. We saw the prime minister of Kenya, who is suspected of crimes against humanity. Yad Vashem has turned into an institution that whitewashes the crimes of these regimes — as long as they do business with Israel.”

Yael Weiss-Reind, whose family was murdered in Hungary during the Holocaust, said that Yad Vashem was granting legitimacy to these regimes when it “accepts leaders who carry out policies and ideologies that are very similar to what we saw decades ago.”

“My family is from Hungary,” she says, “my grandfather was murdered in Auschwitz, and the prime minister of Hungary, who is being welcomed here with respect, has previously expressed his admiration for the leader who helped carry out the annihilation of 564,000 Jews. I am disgusted by the fact that the State of Israel is hosting him.”

This article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

Don’t fear the rise of designer babies, gene editing is about curing disease | Kenan Malik

No! It is about making money and possibly – oops – causing disease unintended, as well as furthering ideas of dead Nazis! If we had given in to such hysteria over IVF, Louise Brown would never have been born

‘Designer babies on horizon”, ran the headlines. Last week, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, an independent body advising on policy, published a report on genome editing and human reproduction.

New scientific techniques, such as CRISPR-Cas9 – molecular “scissors” that allow scientists to snip the genome at specific points – have transformed genetics in recent years and raised questions about what is practically possible and ethically acceptable. Despite the lurid headlines, they are not ushering in a new world of designer babies.

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‘I tended to the bodies’: attacked by the Philippine army

Villagers massacred amid conflict between indigenous community and coffee plantation

When the soldiers opened fire on Datal Bonglangon village, there was first confusion, then terror, then grief. But Marivic Danyan – one of the younger, quieter members of the community – decided to be strong. Reluctantly, heartbreakingly strong.

The young T’boli woman had been preparing lunch when her remote, indigenous community on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao was peppered with gunfire. One bullet ripped into the wooden wall beside her. Another pierced the corrugated tin roof.

I urge people not to buy coffee from this region. It has caused us so much suffering

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Ukrainian hunger striker ‘on edge of life and death’

Ukrainian prisoner Oleh Sentsov, on hunger strike for the last 68 days, is on the edge of life and death, his cousin Natalya Kaplan has told The Independent. 

“We don’t know how long his body will keep going, but we’ve been told he’s in a pre-death state,” she said. “It’s a miracle he has lasted this long.”

The filmmaker and pro-Ukrainian activist was detained in Crimea in 2014. A year later, he was controversially sentenced by military court to 20 years’ imprisonment.

The case against him was formally terrorism, but many believe the real reason was his active opposition to Russia’s annexation.

In May, he announced a hunger strike – the aim of which, he said, was not his own freedom, but that of several dozen Ukrainian political prisoners held in Russia. He told family and friends he was ready to go to the end.

Two weeks ago, Ms Kaplan travelled to the Russian far north, 2,000km away from Moscow, to see her cousin in prison. She said he had lost more than 15kg since beginning the hunger strike, and his health was “deteriorating rapidly”. 


Ukrainian filmmaker times hunger strike for World Cup


Approximately one week ago, Mr Sentsov was transferred to an intensive care unit following a heart seizure. No one is certain exactly when this happened, she said, since Mr Sentsov, in information isolation, is no longer sure of his calendar.

“He remembers that they tried to forcefeed him in hospital, but he resisted,” she said.

“They came up with a compromise, where he agreed to take two to three spoonfuls of nutritional mix to support his heart. After 68 days of starvation, he needs much more than this.” 

Lawyer Dmitry Dinze, who visited Mr Sentsov on Thursday, described his client as in “very pale, very bad shape”. He likened him to the gaunt, haunted leading character in Kashchei the Immortal, a Soviet-era film.

But he told The Independent he had no doubt that Mr Sentsov would continue his hunger strike – even though he might have “just a few weeks” left. 

We don’t know how long his body will keep going, but we’ve been told he’s in a pre-death state 

Natalya Kaplan, cousin 

There is little sense that Ukraine and Russia are close to agreement on a deal that would see Mr Sentsov released. After a slow start, the Ukrainian government is doing “all that it can” to free him, Mr Dinze said.

Several prominent figures inside Russia and beyond have filed petitions, urging Vladimir Putin to pardon the film director. 

On 22 June, his mother also wrote to the Russian president. “I will not try to persuade you about my son’s innocence, but I will simply say that he killed no one,” she wrote.

“His children are waiting for him. They will never be happy without a father.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he would look into the matter. But Mr Putin, who has insisted Mr Sentsov is a terrorist, has so far chosen not to respond directly. 

Russia tests ‘invincible’ hypersonic missile

In June, Mr Putin reportedly agreed with Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko that human rights ombudsmen would be allowed to visit prisoners in each others’ countries. 

On 26 June, Russian ombudsman Tamara Moskalkova travelled to Kiev and was granted access to Russian sailors being held by Ukraine. Ukrainian ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova flew to Russia in return.

But she spent over two weeks trying, unsuccessfully, to get access to Mr Sentsov.

Ms Denisova told The Independent that she saw “no sign” the Russian side was ready to agree to release Mr Sentsov.  

“We offered 36 people in exchange. We have not received one reply to our offer,” she said. 

“What is there to talk about? There is only one person who decides the question and that is Putin.”