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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

Facing economic collapse, Afghanistan is gripped by starvation

Facing economic collapse, Afghanistan is gripped by starvation

The New York Times reports: One by one, women poured into the mud brick clinic, the frames of famished children peeking out beneath the folds of their pale gray, blue and pink burqas. Many had walked for more than an hour across this drab stretch of southern Afghanistan, where parched earth meets a washed-out sky, desperate for medicine to pump life back into their children’s shrunken veins. For months, their once-daily meals had grown more sparse as harvests failed, wells…

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The only nation in the world where civilian guns outnumber people

The only nation in the world where civilian guns outnumber people

CNN reports: Atlanta. Orlando. Las Vegas. Newtown. Parkland. San Bernardino. Ubiquitous gun violence in the United States has left few places unscathed over the decades. Still, many Americans hold their right to bear arms, enshrined in the US Constitution, as sacrosanct. But critics of the Second Amendment say that right threatens another: The right to life. America’s relationship to gun ownership is unique, and its gun culture is a global outlier. As the tally of gun-related deaths continue to grow…

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Why Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ reminds me of my years in a Syrian prison

Why Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ reminds me of my years in a Syrian prison

Omar Alshogre writes: A lot of people I know have been watching the Netflix show “Squid Game,” the dystopian drama in which players participate in surreal versions of traditional Korean children’s games. The losers are punished by death — until only one is left alive. My friends see “Squid Game” as a kind of horror movie, a grotesque commentary on the gap between rich and poor in today’s capitalist societies. To them, it’s a fantasy, a frightening fable. But I’m…

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Migrants face ‘desperate situation’ at Poland-Belarus border

Migrants face ‘desperate situation’ at Poland-Belarus border

The Guardian reports: For two days the same looped recording has been blaring out from speakers on the Polish border: “Attention! Attention! Crossing the Polish border is legal only at border crossings.” The ominous warning is directed at the thousands of asylum seekers massed in Belarus on the opposite side of the barbed wire running between the two countries. According to Poland, Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, is deliberately provoking a new refugee crisis in Europe by organising the movement of…

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Foreman says military jury was disgusted by CIA torture

Foreman says military jury was disgusted by CIA torture

The New York Times reports: A Navy captain who as head of a jury in a war-crimes court wrote a damning letter calling the C.I.A.’s torture of a terrorist “a stain on the moral fiber of America” said his views are typical of senior members of the U.S. military. Capt. Scott B. Curtis, the jury foreman, said it is just that he had the opportunity to express his thoughts in a letter proposing clemency for the prisoner Majid Khan, a…

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Secret Israeli dossier provides no proof for declaring Palestinian NGOs ‘terrorists’

Secret Israeli dossier provides no proof for declaring Palestinian NGOs ‘terrorists’

+972 reports: On Oct. 22, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz designated six prominent Palestinian human rights groups as “terrorist organizations,” citing alleged links with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a left-wing Palestinian party and militant movement. Despite the severity of the declaration, which was reportedly based on intelligence gathered by the Shin Bet, Israel has failed to present any documents directly or indirectly linking the six organizations to the PFLP or to any violent activity. So…

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CIA abuse was ‘closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history,’ says military jury

CIA abuse was ‘closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history,’ says military jury

The New York Times reports: Seven senior U.S. military officers who sentenced a terrorist to 26 years in prison last week after hearing graphic descriptions of his torture by the C.I.A. wrote a letter calling his treatment “a stain on the moral fiber of America.” The rebuke of the U.S. government’s treatment of Majid Khan, a suburban Baltimore high school graduate turned Qaeda courier, was contained in a two-page handwritten letter urging the senior Pentagon official overseeing the war court…

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Detainee ‘was raped at the hands of the U.S. government,’ court is told

Detainee ‘was raped at the hands of the U.S. government,’ court is told

The New York Times reports: A suburban Baltimore high school graduate turned Al Qaeda courier, speaking to a military jury for the first time, gave a detailed account this week of the brutal forced feedings, crude waterboarding and other physical and sexual abuse he endured during his 2003 to 2006 detention in the C.I.A.’s overseas prison network. Appearing in open court, Majid Khan, 41, became the first former prisoner of the black sites to openly describe, anywhere, the violent and…

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Facebook failed the world

Facebook failed the world

The Atlantic reports: In the fall of 2019, Facebook launched a massive effort to combat the use of its platforms for human trafficking. Working around the clock, its employees searched Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram for keywords and hashtags that promoted domestic servitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. Over the course of a few weeks, the company took down 129,191 pieces of content, disabled more than 1,000 accounts, tightened its policies, and added new ways to detect this kind…

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Biden should end America’s longest war: The War on Drugs

Biden should end America’s longest war: The War on Drugs

John Hudak writes: The War on Drugs, not the war in Afghanistan, is America’s longest war. It has used trillions of American taxpayer dollars, militarized American law enforcement agencies (federal, state, and local), claimed an untold number of lives, railroaded people’s futures (especially among Black, Latino, and Native populations), and concentrated the effort in the country’s most diverse and poorest neighborhoods. The War on Drugs has been a staggering policy failure, advancing few of the claims that presidents, members of…

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U.S. special envoy for Haiti resigns amid deportations

U.S. special envoy for Haiti resigns amid deportations

Reuters reports: The U.S. special envoy for Haiti, Ambassador Daniel Foote, has resigned, a senior State Department official said on Thursday, amid mass deportations of Haitians who fled recent political turmoil and natural disasters at home. The U.S. government has continued to fly hundreds of people, including families, back to Haiti, with conditions deteriorating in migrant camps on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. “I will not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of…

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U.S. treatment of Haitian migrants discriminatory

U.S. treatment of Haitian migrants discriminatory

Human Rights Watch: The US deployment of border agents on horseback against Haitian migrants on September 19, 2021, stems from abusive and racially discriminatory immigration policies by the administration of President Joe Biden, Human Rights Watch said today. The previous day, the Department of Homeland Security announced a six-step “strategy to address the increase of migrants in [the Texas border city of] Del Rio” that included a “surge” of agents to “improve control of the area” and new expulsion flights…

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A million Afghan children could die in ‘most perilous hour,’ UN warns

A million Afghan children could die in ‘most perilous hour,’ UN warns

The New York Times reports: Millions of Afghans could run out of food before the arrival of winter and one million children are at risk of starvation and death if their immediate needs are not met, top United Nations officials warned on Monday, putting the country’s plight into stark relief. Secretary General António Guterres, speaking at a high-level U.N. conference in Geneva convened to address the crisis, said that since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan last month, the nation’s poverty…

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How the NYPD is using post-9/11 tools on everyday New Yorkers

How the NYPD is using post-9/11 tools on everyday New Yorkers

The New York Times reports: It was an unusual forearm tattoo that the police said led them to Luis Reyes, a 35-year-old man who was accused of stealing packages from a Manhattan building’s mailroom in 2019. But the truth was more complicated: Mr. Reyes had first been identified by the New York Police Department’s powerful facial recognition software as it analyzed surveillance video of the crime. His guilty plea earlier this year was not solely the result of keen-eyed detectives…

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Mexico’s Supreme Court rules that criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional

Mexico’s Supreme Court rules that criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional

The New York Times reports: Criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, setting a precedent that could lead to legalization of the procedure across this conservative Catholic country of about 130 million people. The unanimous ruling from the nation’s top court follows years of efforts by a growing women’s movement in Mexico that has repeatedly taken to the streets of major cities to demand greater rights and protections. The decision, which opens the door for Mexico to…

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These corporations bankrolled the sponsors of Texas’ abortion ban

These corporations bankrolled the sponsors of Texas’ abortion ban

Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria report: Texas just enacted the nation’s most draconian abortion ban, prohibiting all abortions after six weeks — before many women even know they are pregnant. There are no exceptions for rape or incest. Further, the law places a $10,000 bounty on anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion in Texas after six weeks. Private citizens can collect the bounty by filing a lawsuit. The politicians who sponsored Texas’ abortion ban are backed by some…

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