Monday, Dec 29th
Last update09:19:04 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
Troy Davis is about to be put to death in what the deceived and the naive refer to as 'the greatest country in the world.' He has issued this statement to those around the world who are horrified by this event::
"The struggle for justice doesn’t end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me. I’m in good spirits and I’m prayerful and at peace. But I will not stop fighting until I’ve taken my last breath."
Guillermo Gomez-Sanchez is a 50-year-old legal resident with a mental disability. In 2004, Gomez was detained because of a dispute at a grocery store over a bag of tomatoes. His detention led him into a labyrinth of abuse and neglect – in an immigration system that increasingly puts profit over justice by handing the reigns to private prison corporations.
Cuéntame’s Immigrants For Sale campaign has documented the case of Guillermo, who got lost in this system, while his mother Dolores Gomez-Sanchez spent years desperately searching for answers. The problem: Guillermo was sent to a private detention facility operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).
Israeli troops fired tear gas indiscriminately and sometimes dangerously to enforce a daytime curfew inside a West Bank village to stop Palestinians holding a peaceful demonstration on their own land, a military whistleblower has told The Independent.
The testimony also reinforces a report by the human rights agency B'Tselem which argues that the way Israel deals with protests in the small village of Nabi Saleh is denying the "basic right" to demonstrate in the West Bank. The right to demonstrate is enshrined in international conventions ratified by Israel.
Over the past five years (since I first reported from Wadi Fukin), Manasra said the situation in his town has deteriorated considerably. Beitar Illit has the highest birthrate of any settlement in the West Bank and currently houses more than 40,000 ultra-orthodox settlers. It has grown by more than 10,000 people since 2006, and planners say it's expected to house 100,000 residents, dwarfing Wadi Fukin (population 1,200) and other nearby Palestinian towns.
It is often the men from Wadi Fukin who run the jackhammers and build the settlement's multistory houses. Cheap Israeli produce has flooded the Palestinian markets, putting farmers in this verdant valley out of business and pushing them into construction jobs.
Israel's naval blockade of the Gaza Strip violates international law, a panel of human rights experts reporting to a U.N. body said on Tuesday, disputing a conclusion reached by a separate U.N. probe into Israel's raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship.
The so-called Palmer Report on the Israeli raid of May 2010 that killed nine Turkish activists said earlier this month that Israel had used unreasonable force in last year's raid, but its naval blockade of the Hamas-ruled strip was legal.
Sir William Gage's inquiry made uncomfortable reading for the Army, with its blow-by-blow account of the violent abuse suffered by Baha Mousa and the other Iraqi detainees in the custody of the 1st Battalion the Queen's Royal Lancashire Regiment in 2003.
Today, the head of the British Army, General Sir Peter Wall, said Mr Mousa's death had "cast a dark shadow" over the Army's reputation and soldiers were now in no doubt about the need to treat detainees humanely and respectfully.
U.S. government medical researchers, including those from the National Institute of Health (NIH), engaged in heinous crimes through secret medical experiments on Guatemalan medical experiments, concluded an investigative report commissioned by President Obama. The report concluded that:
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