Syrian blogger Amina Abdallah kidnapped
Horrible news: A blogger whose frank and witty thoughts on Syria’s uprising, politics and being a lesbian in the country shot her to prominence was last night seized by armed men in Damascus. Amina Arraf, who blogged under the name Amina Abdallah, holds dual Syrian and American citizenship and is the author of the blog [...]
...read morea force more powerful
“We may not currently have the might of the Israeli army and the power of traditions confine us in certain roles, however, we know that one woman standing behind another in a line of solidarity is a force more powerful than both.” –kefah, speaking in at-tuwani village, west bank, palestine i am going to start [...]
...read moreInterrogating Torture
Philip Gourevitch has an excellent comment in this week’s New Yorker about who we should hold accountable for torture. Go read.
...read moreWar Crimes
Yeah, we commit them in secret prisons. WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Thursday made public detailed memos describing brutal interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency, as President Obama sought to reassure the agency that the C.I.A. operatives involved would not be prosecuted. In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods [...]
...read moreWhoops, we do torture people after all
Yeah, oops. One of the more frustrating aspects about this situation — other than the clear human rights violations — is that prolonged detention without charge or trial, coupled with torture and inhumane treatment, shows a fundamental lack of faith in the justice system of a country that conservatives claim to “love” and hold in [...]
...read moreShoes and Democracy
You know, even some Americans *cough* have reacted with amusement at the shoe throwing incident. Bush turned the shoe incident into a serious of puns, saying that he’d “seen the man’s sole” for example, and lauded the incident as a moment in democracy, in effect, that people in a democracy are able to politically express [...]
...read moreAn Eye for an Eye
An Iranian woman was blinded and disfigured when a man threw acid in her face. Now, a court has held that his punishment should be to have five drops of acid dripped into each of his eyes. “At an age at which I should be putting on a wedding dress, I am asking for someone’s [...]
...read moreWoman Stoned For Adultery in Somalia
Trigger Warning In Somalia, insurgents have stoned a woman to death. The woman, who relatives named as Asha Ibrahim Dhuhulow, was buried in the ground up to her neck and pelted with rocks until she was dead. The “crime” of which she was accused was adultery. The 23-year-old woman was placed in a hole up [...]
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