Numerous civilians are reported dead and wounded Friday from heavy fighting in eastern Ukraine, as aid workers warn that the situation is growing increasingly dire for non-combatants—especially children—following the disintegration of a ceasefire between Ukraine and opponents of Kiev earlier this month.
In one incident on Friday, a bomb hit a cultural center in Donetsk, killing five people waiting in line for humanitarian aid, The Independent reports. Another shelling struck a bus shelter in the same city, killing two more people.
According to The Independent, “The self-titled Donetsk People’s Republic, which has administered the city since April, blamed the government for killing civilians with indiscriminate shelling, while Kiev officials accused the separatists of firing on their own stronghold to ruin the chance of peace talks.”
However, the U.S.-backed Kiev government, and pro-government militias, were linked to previous indiscriminate bombings against heavily populated areas in and near Donetsk, killing civilians, as documented by Human Rights Watch.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
In an article published earlier this week, Emilie Rouvroy, Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) coordinator for Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine, described growing trauma and desperation as homes and medical institutions are destroyed in shelling and medical supplies run low.
“There are many terrible things about this conflict, but one of the hardest things is that people feel abandoned,” Rouvroy wrote. “They’re grateful that we’re here, but wherever we go they ask us: ‘Where is everybody? Where are the journalists? Where is the international community?’ People are dying here every day.”
Furthermore, UNICEF warns that “continuous fighting is having a devastating impact on the lives of children.” As of early December, 42 children have died in the conflict, and the number of displaced people has surpassed half a million, over 130,000 of them children.
According to the global body, 5.2 million people are affected by ongoing violence, including 1.7 million children, and 1.4 people are in immediate need of aid.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday closed its investigation into the shooting death of Trayvon Martin without filing hate crime charges against his killer, George Zimmerman.
“Though a comprehensive investigation found that the high standard for a federal hate crime prosecution cannot be met under the circumstances here, this young man’s premature death necessitates that we continue the dialogue and be unafraid of confronting the issues and tensions his passing brought to the surface,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement on Tuesday.
“The death of Trayvon Martin was a devastating tragedy. It shook an entire community, drew the attention of millions across the nation, and sparked a painful but necessary dialogue throughout the country,” Holder stated.
Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder in 2013. He claimed he had acted in self-defense when he shot and killed Martin on February 26, 2012, maintaining that the boy had attacked him, while others said he targeted the black teenager on purpose.
Federal investigators launched their probe into the shooting after widespread outcry over the lackluster effort by local police and prosecutors to arrest and charge Zimmerman.
To classify the shooting as a hate crime, the investigators would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman had intended to kill Martin because he was black. Acting out of negligence or recklessness would not have been enough to charge him.
Martin’s death nearly three years ago focused a national spotlight on the issues of racial profiling and gun control, particularly Florida’s controversial ‘Stand Your Ground’ law. The case drew heated, widespread debate over details of the incident, as well as civil rights protests which erupted around the country.
Many of the questions involved whether Zimmerman, an armed neighborhood watchman with a history of violence, had reason to feel threatened by Martin, a black 17-year-old in a hoodie carrying nothing but Skittles and an iced tea. Martin had been in the area visiting his father and was returning home from a corner store when Zimmerman spotted him and called 911. Against the advice of the emergency operator, Zimmerman followed Martin with a gun, leading to the shooting.
The image of Martin and his hoodie became a familiar symbol of the discrimination faced by men and women of color in the U.S.
The investigators reportedly met with Martin’s family on Tuesday to inform them of the decision before announcing it. The family’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump, who also represented Michael Brown’s family, told the New York Times, “This is very painful for them; they are heartbroken. But they have renewed energy to say that we are going to fight harder to make sure that this doesn’t happen to anybody else’s child.”
In the years following Martin’s death, a spate of high-profile extrajudicial killings of unarmed men and women of color in the U.S. has continued to fuel the growing civil rights movement against racial profiling and police brutality.
During that same period of time, Zimmerman has been arrested on numerous occasions for aggravated assault and domestic violence.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
During a unique conversation hosted by the New School and the New York Times on Thursday, the three people most responsible for bringing the story of mass global surveillance programs orchestrated by the U.S. National Security Agency were brought together for the first time since they first met in a Hong Kong hotel in 2013.
Filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald sat with the New York Times media columnist David Carr on stage while the whistleblower himself, Edward Snowden, appeared via videolink from Russia where he remains under asylum protection.
“Yes, governments possess extraordinary powers—but at the end of the day there are more of us than there are of them.” —Edward SnowdenCitizenFour, the documentary film by Poitras which tells the story of Snowden and the NSA revelations he first entrusted to her and then Greenwald has now won numerous awards and been nominated for the upcoming Acadamy Awards. Discussing both the making of the film and her investigation into the world of NSA surveillance, Poitras described how once you recognize how “pernicious and ominous” the world created by the NSA has become, “it does give you that sense of not being able to sleep” because you come to understand “how deep these powers go.”
Greenwald, who along with his colleagues at the Guardian, won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Snowden documents, said during the talk, “The realm of privacy is critical to human freedom, to political activism and is something that we’ve always sought out.”
Rejecting the idea that “only people who have something to hide” should be worried about government surveillance, Greenwald continued by arguing that what those people are saying “is that ‘I’ve agreed to turn myself into such a submissive, pliant, uninteresting person that I actually don’t think the government is interested in me.’ That in itself is an extraordinary damage—that you accept that bargain or that that bargain even exists. But I think for all of us, just the knowledge that we might be watched at any given moment is very psychologically damaging,” for individual people and for society as a whole.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
On why the revelations have touched such a nerve around the world and why he tends to sleep well at night despite the situation he now finds himself in, Snowden said, “The reality is that people care about our ability to communicate and associate without being monitored and judged based on private activities. And as long as we have that, we will win regardless of the efforts against us.”
He continued, “When it comes down it—and, yes, governments possess extraordinary powers—but at the end of the day there are more of us than there are of them. And as long as we work together and as long as we value our rights, we will be able to protect them and assert them.”
In a sad twist, Mr. Carr, a book author and long-celebrated staff writer for the Times, died just hours after hosting the event, making his discussion with Snowden, Poitras, and Greenwald his final public appearance and very last piece of journalistic work.
In the latest sign of rising tensions between the United States and Venezuela, President Barack Obama on Monday issued and signed an executive order declaring the Latin American country “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security” and ordering sanctions on seven state officials.
Justifying its mandate, the executive order cites alleged “erosion of human rights guarantees, persecution of political opponents, curtailment of press freedoms, use of violence and human rights violations and abuses in response to anti-government protests, and arbitrary arrest and detention of anti-government protestors, as well as the exacerbating presence of significant public corruption.”
Relations between the two countries “are currently in tatters,” as NPR puts it.
Congress passed legislation late last year authorizing penalties that would freeze the assets and ban visas for anyone accused of carrying out acts of violence or violating the human rights of those opposing Venezuela’s government. State officials said those sanctions were politically motivated.
In December, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro—who has accused the U.S. of helping plot a coup against him—denounced the sanctions and told a crowd of supporters in Caracas that recent police killings in New York and Ferguson were a sign that the U.S. was becoming an “imperialist police state.”
Just last week, the Venezuelan government gave the U.S. two weeks to cut 80 of the 100 diplomats it has in the country and imposed new travel bans. Former U.S. President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney are just two of the names included on a list of U.S. citizens now ineligible for Venezuelan visas.
But these developments are part of a familiar narrative, writes Sonali Kolhatkar, host and executive producer of the daily radio show Uprising: “The backdrop to these political moves is a new crisis within Venezuela that has an old script: right-wing leaders plan a coup, with the U.S. deeply implicated; wealthy protesters take to the streets; and the Western media cover both stories with great sympathy while openly mocking the democratically elected government for attempting to defend itself.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
Kolhatkar continues:
In fact, Kolhatkar asserts: “Media coverage of Venezuela is so skewed that even the contentious issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to generate fairer coverage these days.”
A full list of the sanctioned Venezuelan officials can be found at the Guardian.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Despite a new announcement by the U.S. Department of Education that it will begin a process of debt-forgiveness for students cheated into high-priced loans by predatory for-profit colleges, one of the groups most responsible for lobbying to have the debts erased is reacting bitterly, saying the plan is more complicated than it needs to be and that those already victimized by one government-backed scheme should not be put through the ringer for a second time.
“The legal and most painless possible process for students is no process. […] An automatic, class-wide discharge for defrauded Corinthian students would not cost taxpayers, as it would be offset by government profits on the student loan program.” —StrikeDebt
On Monday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced that ten of thousands of students who attended institutions operated by Corinthian Colleges Inc.—which, before recently going bankrupt, ran hundreds of schools under the names of Heald, WyoTech and Everest colleges—would be eligible to apply for debt forgiveness as part of the new plan.
As part of the announcement, Secretary Duncan said he would “hold schools accountable for practices that undercut their students and taxpayers.” And he added, “Where students have been harmed by fraudulent practices, I am fully committed to making sure students receive every penny of relief they are entitled to under law. We will make this process as easy as possible for them, including by considering claims in groups wherever possible, and hold institutions accountable.”
Common Dreams is a not-for-profit news service. All of our content is free to you – no subscriptions; no ads. We are funded by donations from our readers. This media model only works if enough readers pitch in. We have millions of readers every month and, it seems, too many take our survival for granted. It isn’t. Our critical Mid-Year fundraiser is off to a very slow start – only 206 readers have contributed a total of $7,500 so far. We must raise $42,500 more before we can end this fundraising campaign and get back to focusing on what we do best. If you support Common Dreams and you want us to survive, we need you. Click Here: Bape Kid 1st Camo Ape Head rompers
As the Associated Press reports:
The DOE released a fact sheet to explain the new program and answer questions for students curious about whether or not they will be eligible for the loan-forgiveness program. But the fact sheet itself, a lengthy and complicated document, was already raising the alarm for student debt activists who appeared unconvinced that Duncan’s new plan will deliver on its “as easy as possible” promises.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
In response to the plan announced by Duncan, the group Strike Debt—which made international headlines by bringing together Corinthian students who vowed publicly that they would not repay loans they considered fraudulent—said forgiveness of their debt need not be so complicated. Furthermore, they challenged the idea, made in much of the mainstream reporting on the plan, that it would somehow “cost taxpayers” to nullify their loans.
In a statement, the group said:
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Lando Norris landed himself in hot water with Formula 1 on Friday when the McLaren driver broadcasted a live chat with his fans on Twitch.
During Friday’s washout, when everyone was trying to keep themselves occupied or entertained during the endless wait, Norris kicked off a Twitch stream in his driver’s room flanked by McLaren teammate Carlos Sainz.
The pair were interacting with their fans who were also patiently waiting for proceedings to start when a member of the McLaren team ordered the two drivers to immediately end the stream, insisting F1 were “not happy” with the online initiative.
“What?!” replied a bewildered Norris.
“Ok I think it is time to say goodbye,” Sainz added. “We need to say adios. We’re getting told off!”
A disappointed Norris ended the broadcast by telling his fans to “Go and blame F1, chat.”
It’s likely Norris fell foul of Formula 1’s media rights that restricts drivers from streaming live from the paddock, even if it is from the confines of a private space at the track.
When it took over Formula 1 in 2017, Liberty Media gave teams and drivers greater freedom to engage with fans on social media from inside the circuit, relaxing the rules that had been highly controlled up to then by former F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone.
Teams and drivers were issued a formal set of guidelines, but streaming live from the paddock is still off limits for everyone.
Gallery: The beautiful wives and girlfriends of F1 drivers
Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter
Revealing their commitment to ravaging critical safety net programs while accommodating corporations and the ultra-wealthy, the Republican-controlled House unveiled on Tuesday a budget proposal (pdf) that would undermine both Social Security and Medicare, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and prioritize tax cuts for the one percent—all while boosting defense spending.
The U.S. Senate, also majority Republican, is expected to introduce similar legislation on Wednesday.
According to news reports, the initial proposals, authored by House Budget Committee chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) and Senate Budget Committee chairman Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), seek to balance the federal budget over 10 years, without raising taxes. To achieve those goals, the plans are expected to include $5 trillion in cuts to domestic programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, Pell grants, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, over the course of the next decade.
It would provide $90 billion in additional war funding—much more than the $51 billion proposed by President Barack Obama—while pushing cuts to renewable energy incentives and climate change programs and repealing parts of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.
And, as Sahil Kapur writes for Talking Points Memo, “the budget sets the stage for a showdown next year on Social Security.”
The New York Times notes that the proposal “leans heavily on the policy prescriptions that Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin outlined when he was budget chairman”—prescriptions that were blasted at the time as “a path to more adversity.”
According to Politico:
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
The austere budget plan drew immediate criticism from many corners.
“There should be no compromise from the Democratic minority on any of this,” political analyst Charles Pierce wrote at Esquire. “It should be rejected, root and branch, because it is based on an economic philosophy, and an overall view of the relationship between people and their government, that has failed the country and its people savagely in the past and inevitably will do so again.”
In his breakdown of intra-party budget battles, Dave Johnson of the Campaign for America’s Future noted that despite any splits over specifics, the governing majority has one common desire.
“All of these Republican factions want the government cut back,” Johnson wrote. “None of them care about investing in infrastructure, investing in science, investing in education, expanding health care and safety-net programs for people who need it, or otherwise helping the public.”
Carmel Martin, executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress joined in calling on Congress to reject the proposal.
“Republicans are talking big with respect to tackling income inequality and wage stagnation, but the House budget proposal does not match their rhetoric,” she said. “Rather than creating jobs with investments in infrastructure and education or strengthening health care and nutrition programs to give families a foothold to climb into the middle class, the House majority has once again prioritized big tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations.”
In USA Today on Monday, journalist Nicole Gaudiano reported that Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who may run for president in 2016, plans to fight the GOP budget plan tooth and nail.
Sanders, she wrote, said he wants to take next year’s budget resolution in a “radically different” direction from the one preferred by House and Senate Republicans, declaring: “I’m going to work as hard as I can with other progressive members of the Senate to do everything we can to make sure this budget is not balanced on the backs of working families and low-income Americans.”
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Arizona’s governor signed an extreme abortion restriction bill on Monday, which women’s health advocates say effectively writes medical malpractice into law.
The new law, which passed the state’s Republican-controlled legislature last week, requires that doctors tell women that drug-induced abortions can be reversed. Experts said the provision—the first of its kind to pass in the U.S.—was medically unfounded.
“This law will force abortion providers to give patients information about medical abortion care that is unsubstantiated and not supported by evidence—even abortion opponents admit there is no medical proof to support this information,” said Vicki Saporta, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation. “This is unacceptable and not how safe medical care of any kind is provided.”
The LA Times reported that State Sen. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who voted against the legislation, said the provision “requires medical professionals to commit medical malpractice.”
“This is junk science. It is quack medicine,” she said Wednesday. “There is absolutely no evidence anywhere in any peer-reviewed journal that supports this as a valid medical procedure.”
According to MSNBC‘s Irin Carmon, who said the bill was part of “the next wave of abortion restrictions”:
Reproductive rights advocates charge that the law is part of coordinated attack on abortion rights across the country. Indeed, Arizona’s “abortion reversal” language is cribbed from Americans United for Life’s 2015 model legislation guide (pdf).
“It’s just a piece of the larger strategy—using any means possible to dissuade a woman from a decision that she’s already made,” Hayley Smith, associate advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU, told ThinkProgress last week.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
Amanda Allen, state legislative counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, echoed that charge.
“Efforts to encourage women to ‘reverse’ mifepristone with progesterone are rooted solely in the desire by anti-choice extremists to control the reproductive choices of women and are not based in any evidence-based medicine or research,” Allen told Common Dreams in an email.
She continued:
Arizona’s SB 1318 also bars insurance companies from providing abortion services to women who purchase medical coverage through the federal health-care exchange, except in cases of rape, incest, or where the woman’s life is endangered.
In a statement, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey said the legislation “protects Arizona taxpayers” by ensuring public funds are “not used to subsidize abortions.”
Arizona already has severe abortion restrictions in place. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion policies around the country, a woman must receive state-directed counseling that includes information designed to discourage her from having an abortion and then wait 24 hours before the procedure is provided. Counseling must be provided in person and must take place before the waiting period begins, thereby necessitating two separate trips to the facility.
On top of that, a woman must undergo an ultrasound before obtaining an abortion and the provider must offer her the option to view the image. The ultrasound must be provided at least 24 hours before the abortion.
In addition, the use of telemedicine for the performance of medication abortion is prohibited. Medication abortion must be provided using the FDA protocol, thereby preventing the use of a more common, simpler evidence-based regimen.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth on Monday sentenced former Blackwater security guard Nicholas Slatten to life in prison for his role in a 2007 attack on Iraqi civilians, which left 14 dead and wounded 17 others.
The Associated Press reports that the three other Blackwater employees—Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard—were sentenced to 30 years and one day each on charges that included manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and using firearms while committing a felony.
Four former Blackwater guards face sentencing Monday for their role in the deaths of 14 Iraqi civilians during a 2007 massacre called “Baghdad’s bloody Sunday.”
The men, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Paul Slough, and Nicholas Slatten, were convicted in October 2014 after years of legal battles. “Slatten faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole for first-degree murder before U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth,” the Washington Post reports; the other three men face the possibility of dozens of years behind bars.
While defense lawyers have argued that the men were acting in self-defense, federal prosecutors wrote that the men’s “crimes here were so horrendous—the massacre and maiming of innocents so heinous—that they outweigh any factors that the defendants may argue form a basis for leniency.”
In an interview with Democracy Now! last year, Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, described the deadly traffic square shooting that left 17 people killed:
As Common Dreams previously reported, “the incident became a flashpoint of outrage over the atrocities that U.S. forces—particularly mercenaries—inflict on occupied civilian populations in Iraq.”
The Post reports Monday: “Defendants said that the case is the first in which the U.S. government prosecuted its own security contractors for the firearms violation, which involve weapons given them by the government to do their jobs in a war zone.”
Scahill wrote following the guilty convictions that they marked yet another instance in which high-ranking individuals failed to be the targets for accountability.
“Just as with the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, it is only the low level foot-soldiers of Blackwater that are being held accountable. [Blackwater founder Erik] Prince and other top Blackwater executives continue to reap profits from the mercenary and private intelligence industries.
“None of the U.S. officials from the Bush and Obama administrations who unleashed Blackwater and other mercenary forces across the globe are being forced to answer for their role in creating the conditions for the Nisour Square shootings and other deadly incidents involving private contractors,” Scahill wrote.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Marking yet another grim milestone for an ever-warming planet, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealed on Wednesday that, for the first time in recorded history, global levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere averaged over 400 parts per million (ppm) for an entire month—in March 2015.
“This marks the fact that humans burning fossil fuels have caused global carbon dioxide concentrations to rise more than 120 parts per million since pre-industrial times,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, in a press statement. “Half of that rise has occurred since 1980.”
This is not the first time the benchmark of 400 ppm has been reached.
“We first reported 400 ppm when all of our Arctic sites reached that value in the spring of 2012,” explained Tans. “In 2013 the record at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory first crossed the 400 ppm threshold.”
However, Tans said that reaching 400 ppm across the planet for an entire month is a “significant milestone.”
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
A tweet released by NOAA on Wednesday shows that this development is consistent with rising levels over recent years.
However, zooming to a wider historical lens shows an even more dramatic increase. During pre-industrial times, CO2 levels were at 280 ppm. Scientists have warned that, in order to achieve safe levels, CO2 must be brought down to a maximum of 350ppm—the number from which the environmental organization 350.org derives its name.
Bill Snape, senior counsel to the Center for Biological Diversity, told Common Dreams, “The fact that we are now firmly over 400 ppm for first time in human history indicates to me that we ought to be moving with much more urgency to fix the underlying problem.”
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.