The biggest human rights scandal in years is developing in Colombia. The largest mass grave unearthed in Colombia was discovered by accident last year just outside a Colombian Army base in La Macarena, a rural municipality located in the Department of Meta just south of Bogota. The grave was discovered when children drank from a [...]
Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager’s mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording. Within minutes, Glik said, he was in handcuffs. The charge was illegal electronic surveillance. Police charged Glik [...]
At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive [...]
According to the president of Venezuela’s National Statistics Institute (INE), Elías Eljuri, poverty in Venezuela declined to 23% in the second semester of 2009, while extreme poverty has fallen to 6%. This contrasts substantially with poverty rates of 70% and extreme poverty of 40% in 1996, before the election of Venezuela’s current president, Hugo Chávez. Venezuela will also [...]
Maria Gunnoe, a life time resident of West Virginia, won the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work as a community organizer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition against mountain top removal mining practices in Appalachia. Mountain top removal is the process of first clearing, then blasting roughly 800 feet of rocks and dirt from the [...]
On October 6, 2009, Aljazeera news reported that three Iranian reformist newspapers, Day’s Analysis, Culture of Reconciliation, and Ideals were closed during a night raid by the government, stopping the production of the news. Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rise to power the government has shut down multiple news sources around the country. The government has revealed [...]
Attention has shifted from media coverage of the war in Iraq to the war in Afghanistan in recent weeks. Alissa Rubin, former Baghdad bureau chief for the New York Times, recently expressed her views in a New York Times’ editorial on the media’s role throughout the war in Iraq and how lessons must be learned [...]
Questions and concerns were raised at the International Atomic Energy Agency Conference in Vienna about Israel’s nuclear capabilities. Israel’s only statement about its nuclear capabilities came in 2005, when they opted out of the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty. Their abstention meant the country was not any admitting nuclear capabilities it might have. At the conference, 49 [...]
By: Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips “There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.” –Charles Dickens The Corporate News Media: Not in the Business of News The late New York University media scholar Neil Postman once said about America, “We are the best entertained least informed society [...]
Millions of Afro-Brazilians, who in some states like Bahia account for 75 per cent of the population, are mired in poverty, lack access to basic services and employment opportunities, and face serious discrimination, injustice and violence. These are some of the key conclusions that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has reached after a just ended weeklong visit [...]
