human rights
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2009I urge people to go read Russell Blackford's submission to the Human Rights consultative committee in Australia. It deals with the changes and challenges to civil liberties in the modern era and although Australia-focussed, it generalises well once you get past our odd spelling conventions and local events.
revere | March 15, 2009Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of the death of peace activist Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by a caterpillar tractor driven by the Israeli Defense Forces in occupied Palestine. She was trying to negotiate with the driver not to destroy the homes of Palestinians being subjected to collective punishment for demonstrating against the occupation (see our posts here, here, here). What makes this year's anniversary even more painful is fresh news: 37 year old Tristan Anderson from Oakland, California, a dedicated pacifist with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), is on life-support…
revere | January 29, 2009A powerful Editorial in today's Nature (the world's premier science publication) shines a strong light on a tragic violation of human rights in Iran involving two leading AIDS physicians, brothers Arash and Kamiar Alaei. We've posted about it twice (here and here). Declan Butler, a senior correspondent at Nature summarizes the story over at his blog:
Iran has sentenced two of the country’s HIV researchers to prison for communicating with an “enemy government” and plotting to overthrow the state. Arash and Kamiar Alaei, who are brothers, underwent a half-day trial on 31 December in Tehran’s…
revere | January 21, 2009Some people noticed a remarkable thing that happened on the Washington Mall on Sunday at the Obama pre-Inaugural concert, a part of which I posted on Tuesday. The second last appearance was by Pete Seeger, his grandson Tao and Bruce Springsteen singing Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land. What made it remarkable is the inclusion of three verses from the original version that are rarely heard under any circumstances and never heard in the corridors of power, much less in front of a world wide audience and in the presence and in honor of someone about to ascend to the Presidency of the…
revere | January 14, 2009Last week we alerted you to a gross miscarriage of justice involving two doctors in Iran. Many of you responded by calling the Mission of Iran at the UN and signing a petition. I wish I could report good news in this update, but so far what we have heard is not encouraging. From an email from Physicians for Human Rights USA:
I wanted to send you an urgent update on the case of Drs Kamiar and Arash Alaei. We still do not have a verdict in the case, but have released a press statement this evening in response to reports out of Iran today that are very troubling. A spokesperson for the Iranian…
revere | January 12, 2009Some people complain the news about the Gaza massacre is one sided or incomplete. And it is both. This is one reason it appears one sided. Because it is. And it's incomplete. In the US we don't see this (h/t The Brain Police):
sporte | January 8, 2009AIDS, to me, is such a scary horrible disease that it seems that all of us would naturally support a cure and work together stop it from spreading. I even forced my family to watch a movie on AIDS over the holidays. (And the Band Played On, based on a book with same title by Randy Shilts, who died of AIDS in 1994).
That's why I was astounded to read last night, at the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) news site, that the Iranian government has put two doctors in prison - doctors who specialize in treating AIDS patients. The PHR, if you're wondering, is well known for supporting human…
revere | January 7, 2009Many of you were readers here when science bloggers and scienceblogs in particular played a pivotal role in the case of the Tripoli 6, medics under sentence of death in Libya over trumped up charges of infecting children with HIV. Another urgent matter now confronts the worldwide scientific community involving two Iranian doctors. Declan Butler, Nature senior correspondent, has described the situation in a post at one of the Nature blogs:
Iran puts leading HIV scientists on trial
Posted on behalf of Declan Butler
Iran has summarily tried two of the nation's HIV researchers with communicating…
revere | January 4, 2009This is about the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Because it cannot be ignored. Let me be clear at the outset: I think the assault on Gaza is brutal, vicious and cruel, the act of a notorious regional bully. Israeli leaders (Olmert, Barak, Livni and probably others) are war criminals in a class with Bushes Jr. and Sr., Kissinger, Nixon, Pinochet, Putin, Saddam, MiloÅ¡eviÄ, Karadzic, Charles Taylor and a number of others. I wanted to get that out of the way because I don't want this to be misunderstood as a defense of Israeli actions. Far from it. It is a condemnation of the kind of action that has…
revere | January 4, 2009It's time once again for the inimitable Marcus Brigstocke on The Abrahamic Religions. Yes, I know we've done it before, but some of you may have missed it and those who have seen it will get to see it again because you can't see stuff like this too often. Especially when two of the main Abrahamic religions are duking it out and doing their best to kill innocent people because they are of a different tribe:
Kudos to Firedog Lake and Huffington Post for keeping the brutal slaughter in Gaza in front of us where we have to see it.
revere | December 26, 2008It's the end of a year that saw historic election in the United States. An African American was elected President. To many of us felt like a turning point. We'll have to see. But if it is, it is due to many people, some of whom we know, most of whom we will never know. Black people fought hard and long and suffered greatly. They had allies in the white community, including many academics. I thought of all this recently when reading the Preface of a book on the nineteenth century philosopher Gottlob Frege. If you aren't a philosopher or philosophy student (or possibly a logician) you may not…
revere | November 14, 2008Reader JJ reminds me that while we celebrate Obama's victory and a new mood of hope and optimism in the US, the people of the Gaza strip have little to celebrate and even less reason for hope and optimism:
The UN has no more food to distribute in the Gaza Strip, the head of relief efforts in the area has warned.
John Ging said handouts for 750,000 Gazans would have to be suspended until Saturday at the earliest, and called Gaza's economic situation "a disaster".
Israel earlier denied entry to a convoy carrying humanitarian supplies.
It has prevented the transfer of all goods into Gaza for…
revere | November 12, 2008In the 1960s, long before anyone ever heard of "World Music," a young South African artist by the name of Miriam Makeba made us fall in love with the music of her continent. Known throughout the world as Mama Africa, Miriam Makeba collapsed and died on Monday just after leaving a concert stage in Italy. I am glad she lived to see the United States, a country where she lived and performed for many years, just days before turn a corner on race.
Miriam Makeba has a special place in the hearts and lives of so many of us she inspired then and continued to inspire through the many dark decades she…
revere | November 4, 2008Election Day, November, 1884
by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and
show,
'Twould not be you, Niagara--nor you, ye limitless prairies--nor
your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite--nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic
geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon's white cones--nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes--nor
Mississippi's stream:
--This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name--the still
small voice vibrating--America's choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen--the…
revere | November 3, 2008Proposition 8, a ballot initiative in California, would make marriage an institution confined to one man and one woman (as opposed to what? many men and one woman or one man and many women? Someone should tell the Mormon Church, the chief bankrollers of this vile initiative, about that!). It is appropriately called Proposition Hate. Polling indicates it is very close in California and this legislative bigotry may well pass, which would be a terrible tragedy. But let's face it. This war is over, even if some skirmishes are left to fight and we may lose some of them. The current younger…
revere | October 21, 2008The New York Times has a very long article by Lawrence Altman, a physician and medical reporter for the newspaper, about the uncertainties regarding the medical histories of the four major party candidates for President and Vice-President. John McCain, a cancer survivor and the candidate who would become the oldest President were he elected, has intensified the interest by his choice of running mate, the inexperienced and probably unqualified Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Joe Biden also has a major medical issue in his background (two berry aneurysms). There are sufficient unknowns about…
revere | September 21, 2008Hats off to fellow blogger Stephen Soldz and his colleagues, leaders of a coalition within the American Psychological Association that campaigned to put the APA on record declaring participation in torture interrogations at US prisons at Guantanamo Bay and similar prison camps an unethical breach of professional standards. The referendum victory (59%) comes after previous failures to ban professional complicity by APA members in interrogations where there is good reason to believe international law is being violated.
The ban means those who are American Psychological Association members can't…
revere | August 24, 2008I belong to a number of professional societies and one of them is the American Mathematical Society. The September issue of one of their publications, the Notices, just arrived and I read with interest a statement by one of the world's most distinguished mathematicians, Brown University's David Mumford. While most members of the public have never heard of him, Mumford has been a famous in mathematical circles for many years, having received the Fields Medal in 1974 for his work in algebraic geometry. The Fields Medal is an extraordinary recognition, perhaps the most prestigious in mathematics…
revere | July 3, 2008Morally-challenged Attorney General Michael Mukasey can't figure out whether waterboarding is torture or not -- he seems to think it is an open question -- but there is nothing stopping him from following the example of fellowdoubter Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is a flagrant Iraq War cheerleader who had earlier parsed waterboarding as a form of "extreme interrogation" rather than torture. Accusing him of torturing the language, critics suggested he get waterboarded himself and then say whether he thought it was torture or not. The Guardian reports that Hitchens has just published his…