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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

Will Biden restore Trump-era policy and trigger a historic famine in Yemen?

Will Biden restore Trump-era policy and trigger a historic famine in Yemen?

HuffPost reports: President Joe Biden’s national security team is in a complex tug of war over a decision that could push millions of people into starvation — weighing the advice of humanitarian experts, most government officials and top Democrats against arguments from hawks who want Biden to restore one of former President Donald Trump’s most controversial policies. Biden is considering slapping the U.S. government’s “foreign terrorist organization” label on the Houthis, an Iran-backed militia that has been fighting American-backed forces…

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After a half-century of federal oversight, segregated neighborhoods are still pervasive across America

After a half-century of federal oversight, segregated neighborhoods are still pervasive across America

ABC News reports: Milwaukee resident Exie Tatum III grew up in heart of the city and still lives there. The African American father owns a home in a predominantly Black neighborhood but has been house-hunting in pricey, majority-white suburbs, searching for an affordable home that he might someday pass along to his young son Charles through inheritance. “It would really change the game,” Tatum said of owning a suburban Milwaukee home. But statistics suggest he’s fighting an uphill battle. Despite…

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Climate change divides along racial lines. Can tackling it help address longstanding injustices?

Climate change divides along racial lines. Can tackling it help address longstanding injustices?

Jeremy Williams writes: When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it was the city’s black neighbourhoods that bore the brunt of the storm. Twelve years later, it was the black districts of Houston that took the full force of Hurricane Harvey. In both cases, natural disasters compounded issues in neighbourhoods that were already stretched. Climate change and racism are two of the biggest challenges of the 21st Century. They are also strongly intertwined. There is a stark divide between…

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Why book banning efforts are spreading across the U.S.

Why book banning efforts are spreading across the U.S.

The New York Times reports: In Wyoming, a county prosecutor’s office considered charges against library employees for stocking books like “Sex Is a Funny Word” and “This Book Is Gay.” In Oklahoma, a bill was introduced in the State Senate that would prohibit public school libraries from keeping books on hand that focus on sexual activity, sexual identity or gender identity. In Tennessee, the McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” from an…

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Amnesty International describes Israel as an apartheid state in new report

Amnesty International describes Israel as an apartheid state in new report

Forward reports: Amnesty International, a widely respected human rights group, plans to release a report on Tuesday accusing Israel of committing apartheid and describing its existence as a Jewish state as a deprivation of Palestinians’ basic rights. Israeli officials on Sunday denounced the report as “antisemitism.” In a 211-page report set for publication on Tuesday and obtained by the Forward, Amnesty alleges that Israel is involved in a “widespread attack directed” against Palestinians that amounts to “the crime against humanity…

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We still can’t see American slavery for what it was

We still can’t see American slavery for what it was

Jamelle Bouie writes: The historian Marcus Rediker opens “The Slave Ship: A Human History” with a harrowing reconstruction of the journey, for a captive, from shore to ship: The ship grew larger and more terrifying with every vigorous stroke of the paddles. The smells grew stronger and the sounds louder — crying and wailing from one quarter and low, plaintive singing from another; the anarchic noise of children given an underbeat by hands drumming on wood; the odd comprehensible word…

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The speech that helped a new generation of Germans face the Nazi past honestly

The speech that helped a new generation of Germans face the Nazi past honestly

Helmut Walser Smith writes: On 8 May 1985, West Germany’s president Richard von Weizsäcker delivered something akin to the Gettysburg Address – not for a nation in the midst of war, as was the case for the United States’ president Abraham Lincoln in 1863, but for a country working through the memory and the meaning of a lost war 40 years after its end. There were, of course, vast differences in the two speeches. Given on a grey day on…

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Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis

Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis

Council on Foreign Relations reports: Months after the Taliban’s takeover, Afghanistan is in crisis. Millions of people are facing starvation, the health-care system is collapsing, and wages are plummeting. The country of thirty-eight million people heavily depended on foreign aid before the Taliban came to power in August. Now, experts say it has been devastated by the international response to the hard-line Islamist group’s seizure of power: halting billions of dollars in assistance and enforcing sanctions that have impeded relief…

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Russian court orders oldest civil rights group Memorial to shut

Russian court orders oldest civil rights group Memorial to shut

BBC News reports: Russia’s Supreme Court has ordered the closure of International Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group. Memorial worked to recover the memory of the millions of innocent people executed, imprisoned or persecuted in the Soviet era. Formally it has been “liquidated” for failing to mark a number of social media posts with its official status as a “foreign agent”. That designation was given in 2016 for receiving funding from abroad. But in court, the prosecutor labelled Memorial a…

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Myanmar’s military is committing crimes against humanity and war crimes, say legal experts

Myanmar’s military is committing crimes against humanity and war crimes, say legal experts

The Washington Post reports: Facing armed resistance after it seized power [in February], the military, known as the Tatmadaw, has escalated its use of force against civilians using tactics honed during past atrocities. A Washington Post analysis of more than 300 videos and photos, some not previously made public, as well as satellite imagery, eyewitness accounts and military planning documents, reveals a premeditated campaign of arson and killing targeting civilians in Chin state beginning in September. Military planning documents shared…

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Assad shows human rights abusers everywhere how to commit atrocities with impunity

Assad shows human rights abusers everywhere how to commit atrocities with impunity

Bente Scheller writes: The regime has so far given no reason to assume that diplomacy alone will get it to change its behavior. Nor has it given any indication that it is willing to make concessions for a lasting peace. It could have offered or honored amnesties, but there isn’t one example of successful reconciliation from any province in Syria. The local cease-fires strategy embraced by the U.N. under then-Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura delivered much of Syria…

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A humanitarian catastrophe: ‘No one benefits from a failed state in Afghanistan’

A humanitarian catastrophe: ‘No one benefits from a failed state in Afghanistan’

David Ignatius writes: Americans have been generous after military victories. Just look at the postwar economic miracles in Germany and Japan. But it’s harder to be generous in defeat — as we see in the Biden administration’s wary response to the humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan following the Taliban’s seizure of power there in August. As winter approaches, Afghanistan’s battered population faces food shortages approaching famine; its financial system has imploded, thanks in part to U.S. Treasury sanctions. There is, literally,…

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How border walls are triggering ecological disaster

How border walls are triggering ecological disaster

George Monbiot writes: This is the century in which humanitarian and environmental disasters converge. Climate breakdown has driven many millions from their homes, and is likely to evict hundreds of millions more. The famine harrowing Madagascar at the moment is the first to have been named by the UN as likely to have been caused by the climate emergency. It will not be the last. Great cities find themselves dangerously short of water as aquifers are drained. Air pollution kills…

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American citizens are mostly subjects following the dictates of their employers

American citizens are mostly subjects following the dictates of their employers

Jamelle Bouie writes: For a vast majority of Americans, democracy ends when work hours begin. Most people in this country are subject, as workers, to the nearly unmediated authority of their employers, which can discipline, sanction or fire them for nearly any reason at all. In other words, Americans are at the mercy of what the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls “private government,” a workplace despotism in which most workers “cede all of their rights to their employers, except those specifically…

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Enes Kanter Freedom: Why I became an American

Enes Kanter Freedom: Why I became an American

Enes Kanter Freedom writes: When I first arrived in the United States, I had to adjust to a new language, new norms, and new traditions. But I was perhaps most stunned by a simple comment a teammate made. He criticized President Barack Obama, which I feared could have landed him in prison. He smiled and said: “This isn’t Turkey, brother. You have the freedom to say whatever you want.” Americans might find the thought absurd, but the threat of prison…

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It’s getting dire in Afghanistan. Biden can’t walk away

It’s getting dire in Afghanistan. Biden can’t walk away

Saad Mohseni writes: In Afghanistan, young babies are now starving to death. Those parents who fear this fate are selling off their children to survive themselves. More than half of Afghanistan’s 39 million people do not have enough to eat and are “marching to starvation,” in the haunting words of the World Food Program. By next year, the United Nations warns, 95 percent of the country could be plunged into poverty. Two months after the Taliban’s takeover, Afghanistan is reeling…

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