Wednesday, Jan 22nd
Last update08:35:36 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
The top UN human rights official has denounced Myanmar's "brutal security operation" against Rohingya in Rakhine state, which he said was "clearly disproportionate" to militia attacks carried out last month.
Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, addressing the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, said that more than 270,000 people had fled to Bangladesh, with more trapped on the border, amid reports of the burning of villages and extrajudicial killings.
Chelsea Manning celebrated her freedom from a military prison by joining the NYC Pride March on Sunday.
Manning, a transgender U.S. army soldier, beamed in front of a giant rainbow colored heart sashayed with an American Civil Liberties Union banner. She was sentenced to 25 years in prison after admitting to leaking more than 700,000 classified documents in 2013.
President Barack Obama commuted her sentence and she was released from Fort Leavenworth prison in May.
Fifteen years after he helped devise the brutal interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects in secret C.I.A. prisons, John Bruce Jessen, a former military psychologist, expressed ambivalence about the program.
He described himself and a fellow military psychologist, James Mitchell, as reluctant participants in using the techniques, some of which are widely viewed as torture, but also justified the practices as effective in getting resistant detainees to cooperate.
“I think any normal, conscionable man would have to consider carefully doing something like this,” Dr. Jessen said in a newly disclosed deposition. “I deliberated with great, soulful torment about this, and obviously I concluded that it could be done safely or I wouldn’t have done it.”
The reality of working in a factory making clothes for Ivanka Trump’s label has been laid bare, with employees speaking of being paid so little they cannot live with their children, anti-union intimidation and women being offered a bonus if they don’t take time off while menstruating.
The Guardian has spoken to more than a dozen workers at the fashion label’s factory in Subang, Indonesia, where employees describe being paid one of the lowest minimum wages in Asia and there are claims of impossibly high production targets and sporadically compensated overtime.
Historical tragedies have their own visual references—footage of violence, photographs of victims—that have been pored over, forgotten, and subsequently rediscovered. Of course, images lose their potency with time, and become faded as witnesses die and disappear. Remembering the story behind the photograph becomes tantamount, since reducing history to a collection of snapshots risks a tragic loss of nuance, depth, and truth.
An Israeli settler has shot and killed a 23-year-old Palestinian during a protest in solidarity with hunger-striking prisoners near Nablus in the occupied West Bank, according to Palestinian officials.
The Palestinian health ministry said the victim succumbed to his wounds on Thursday shortly after being shot at by the settler who fired live ammunition on protesters near a military checkpoint in the village of Huwwara, local Ma'an News Agency reported.
War crimes files revealing early evidence of Holocaust death camps that was smuggled out of eastern Europe are among tens of thousands of files to be made public for the first time this week.
The once-inaccessible archive of the UN war crimes commission, dating back to 1943, is being opened by the Wiener Library in London with a catalogue that can be searched online.
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