Wednesday, Jun 18th
Last update06:06:33 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
The Palestinian "Arab Spring" is arriving and Israel has no political strategy to deal with it. Instead, Israel used the only weapon in its current arsenal - brute force.
They are extraordinary scenes. Film shot on mobile phones captured the moment on Sunday when at least 1,000 Palestinian refugees marched across no-man's land to one of the most heavily protected borders in the world, the one separating Syria from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
One of Rwanda's highest ranking officials involved in the country's 1994 genocide has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for his role in the killing.
Augustin Bizimungu, who was the former head of the army, was convicted by the Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda alongside Augustin Ndindiliyimana, the ex-paramilitary police chief. Two other senior generals were also sentenced.
Some 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus died during the genocide.
A once unimaginable movement is emerging from within Israel's insular Orthodox Jewish community: homosexuals demanding to be accepted and embraced, no matter what the Bible says.
Living alongside a secular majority that has largely embraced the Western gay rights movement, Israel's religious gays are increasingly rejecting age-old dictates to ignore their attraction, abstain from sex or undergo therapy that supposedly will make them straight.
An inquiry into Britain's involvement in torture during the "war on terror" will not investigate whether UK forces handed over suspects to be transported to other countries for interrogation by the Americans – despite David Cameron's assurance that it would probe all aspects of the controversy.
The head of the Detainee Inquiry ordered by Mr Cameron has confirmed that he will not consider the issue of detainees transferred between forces fighting in Iraq and elsewhere, which has been identified by many critics as one of the murkiest elements of the "extraordinary rendition" saga.
The state's top Catholic Friday equated efforts to legalize gay marriage to "Orwellian social engineering."
Archibishop Timothy Dolan on his blog wrote that "history, natural law, the Bible...the religions of the world, human experience, and just plain gumption tells us" marriage is between a man and a woman. "The definition of marriage is hardwired into our human reason," Dolan wrote.
Israel's double standard.
However, on the other hand, the Israeli military law used to manage the Palestinians are similar to those deployed in most Arab countries, where there is no real separation of powers and people are in many respects without rights. Even though there has been a Palestinian Authority since the mid-1990s, there is no doubt that sovereignty still lies in Israeli hands.
One accordingly notices that in this so-called free and democratic country, there are in fact two books of laws, one liberal for its own citizenry and the other for Palestinians under its occupation. Hence, Israel looks an awful lot like apartheid or colonialism.
As in other Sub-Saharan African countries, Uganda has long had a taboo against homosexuality. But the political scapegoating of gays and lesbians is a relatively recent phenomenon, one deliberately exported by the American right.
Uganda is a country where American-style evangelical Christianity is exploding, and there are close links between many American anti-gay preachers, politicians, and activists, and their Ugandan counterparts. As Jeff Sharlet has reported, Bahati, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill’s sponsor, is the secretary of the Ugandan branch of The Family, the secretive American evangelical organization whose members include Sens. James Inhofe, Jim DeMint, and Tom Coburn.
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