Category Archives: Viva!

Further arrests of Saudi women’s rights activists in escalating crackdown

two-faced leaders who are still afraid of women.

Ten leading campaigners reportedly held as media denounce women as ‘traitors’ for supporting end to ban on female drivers

At least 10 prominent Saudi activists, mostly women’s rights campaigners, have now been reported to have been arrested in what appears to be an escalating clampdown ahead of the much-vaunted lifting of the prohibition on women driving in the kingdom on 24 June.

The arrests, with more feared by human rights campaigners, come amid a high-profile campaign in Saudi media outlets and on social media denouncing the women as “traitors”.

Continue reading…

رمضانيات ٣: مهاترات رمضانية

نادية حرحش

كالهاوي الذي يشاهد مباريات كأس العالم ، في المباريات الاولى يتحمس ويتابع ويتعرف على فرق وأسماء تتحول الى ايقونات في عالم الكرة، ثم يعود لممارسة حياته بمتابعة الاهم من المباريات حتى الربع النهائي او النص النهائي ، يعتمد هذا على شهرة فريق الدولة المتأهلة.

وهكذا حياتنا في رمضان . موسم تخالطت عليه الاحداث المهمة ، اراب ايدول والفويس في توقيت واحد .

رمضان وطقوسه من صيام وما تشتهيه العين والنفس من أطعمة وحلوى وما طاب من مسلسلات وسهرات رمضانية . وغزة بمسيراتها نحو العودة لفك الحصار ورفض نقل السفارة الامريكية. الى القدس. والعالم المحيط والبعيد الذي يؤازر الشعب الفلسطيني في قضاياه الحقة، حصار غزة وقتل اهلها ، وتهويد القدس ونقل السفارة الامريكية لها وما يتبعها من دول.

لأننا في رمضان ، ستبقى المسلسلات متصدرة للمشهد بقيادة رامز السخيف المأجور (على حسب اجماع كل المشاهدين المجتمعين بانتظار حلقته)، تتلوها ترصدات لحركة المسلسلات ، العشرات منها ، لا يمكن متابعة الجميع ولا…

View original post 892 more words

New York Times Columnist Says Kevin Cooper May Have Been Framed, Urges DNA Testing That Could Prove His Innocence

Citing extensive evidence that California death-row prisoner Kevin Cooper (pictured) may have been framed, New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof has urged Governor Jerry Brown to permit advanced DNA testing of evidence that could potentially prove Cooper’s innocence. In a column electronically posted by the Times on May 17, 2018 and scheduled to appear in the paper’s May 20 Sunday print edition, Kristof joins a former FBI agent, the American Bar Association, and Judge William A. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in calling for closer review of the case. In his column, Kristof calls Cooper’s case “a failure at every level,” and says that he believes Cooper was framed by the San Bernardino‘s sheriff’s office, which had a history of planting and mishandling evidence. Cooper, who is Black, became the lead suspect in the 1983 killings of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter Jessica Ryen, and 11-year-old neighbor Chris Hughes, in spite of statements by 8-year-old Josh Ryen, the sole survivor of the attack, who twice told investigators that three White men had committed the murders. The four victims had been stabbed or slashed a combined 140 times with an ice pick, a hatchet, and at least one knife—an assault, Kristof said, that a single perpetrator, much less the 155-pound Cooper, was unlikely to have been able to carry out. Multiple witnesses saw three White men driving a vehicle fitting the description of the Ryens’ car—which had been stolen from their home—near the time of the murders. Other witnesses reported three White men in bloody clothes acting strangely at a nearby bar the night of the crime. When the car was found 30 miles away, Kristof writes, it “inconveniently had blood on the driver’s seat, the front passenger seat and the back seat—suggesting at least three killers.” Cooper came under suspicion because he had escaped from a local prison, where he had been incarcerated for robbery, and had hidden in an empty house near the Ryen family’s home. An initial police search of Cooper’s hideout turned up no evidence, but the day after they identified him as a suspect, police “found” the sheath of a hatchet and a bloody prison-uniform button in a room they claimed—falsely, Kristof says—to have not previously searched. The hatchet itself was found in a different direction, near the path the Ryens’ vehicle took the night of the murder, and the button later turned out to be a different color from the uniform Cooper had been wearing. Numerous leads pointed to an alternative suspect, a recently released convicted murderer whom Kristof identifies only as “Lee,” but police destroyed key evidence—a pair of bloody coveralls given to police by Lee’s girlfriend—before any testing took place. In 2004, Cooper was allowed to test a blood sample from a tan T-shirt that was found near the murder scene. The shirt was the same color, size, and brand as a T-shirt Lee’s girlfriend said she had recently bought for him and that he had been wearing earlier on the day of the murders. The testing found Cooper’s blood on the shirt, but his blood was contaminated with a chemical used in preserving blood samples, indicating that it had likely been planted on the shirt. The lab then tested the sample of Cooper’s blood held by the sheriff’s office and found multiple blood types, suggesting that Cooper’s sample had been topped off with someone else’s blood. Testing of other evidence, including the murder weapon and strands of hair found at the scene, could prove Cooper’s claim that he is innocent. Kristof said, “[I]f we execute a man in so flawed a case without even bothering to test the evidence rigorously, then a piece of our justice system dies along with Kevin Cooper.”

(Nicholas Kristof, Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?, The New York Times, May 17, 2018.) See Innocence.

  • 137 reads

New Yorkers respond to racist lawyer’s rant with ‘Latin party’ outside his house

Aaron Schlossberg was abusive to Spanish-speaking workers. Now activists are hosting a party with a theme: retribution

There is a street party happening in New York this evening. There will be taco trucks, Jarritos margaritas and a mariachi band – but this is not a Cinco de Mayo parade that got the date wrong. This party’s only theme will be retribution.

Festivities are taking place outside the Manhattan apartment of Aaron Schlossberg, the lawyer who was filmed being irate and abusive towards Hispanic restaurant workers this week. Schlossberg threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) on the workers, saying he believed they were illegal immigrants because they were speaking Spanish to some customers.

Continue reading…