|
Upcoming Eventsno events match your query! New Eventsno events posted in last week
Blog Feeds
The SakerA bird's eye view of the vineyard
Public InquiryInterested in maladministration. Estd. 2005
Human Rights in IrelandPromoting Human Rights in Ireland
Lockdown Skeptics
|
international / rights, freedoms and repression Sunday August 02, 2009 - 19:12 by Hypatia
Here is an excerpt from an interview with Afshin, a student who was involved in the protests after the rigging of the presidential elections. The full interview text is available at the link below. Can you explain what happened and the reaction from the authorities? The protest at Tehran University was one of the first post-election movements. Students started to gather near the main gate chanting slogans such as ‘Death to the dictator’. This was the same day as Ahmadinejad’s celebration rally in Vali Asr Square - very close to the university. Afterwards some of his supporters, including plain-clothes bassiji, headed to the main gate chanting pro-Ahmadinejad slogans and throwing stones, injuring several students. They eventually forced open the gate and viciously attacked students with wooden sticks - several were killed. That night bassiji and police stormed into the university dormitories whilst students were asleep, leading to more deaths and many arrests. Those held in Evin prison and the ministry of the interior’s underground jail were denied access to food, water and toilets and subjected to torture. They were released after about 30 hours, but not before they had been forced to give a detailed account of their political activities and beliefs. ... read full story / add a comment 
international / education Sunday August 02, 2009 - 14:22 by Susan Boyle
 1 image
BBC News has this weekend added a piece on Hugo Chavez's "revolutionary reading list" to its feature pages. It's a curious article whose timing four months after the launch of the list appears to say little and omit plenty. We are told how there are queues of people in Caracas awaiting a free copy of French 19th century author Victor Hugo's masterpiece "Les Miserables" (in Spanish translation). One happy fellow tells the local BBC chap he's seen the movie and now wants to read the book. I wonder has he ever tried to sing the songs and get on a talent competition? But this curious space filler (all the more curious because in internet news one doesn't have to fill space) prompts me to quickly cast an eye over the efforts of South America to banish illiteracy. ... read full story / add a comment
international / rights, freedoms and repression Saturday August 01, 2009 - 18:50 by Yassamine Mather
Yassamine Mather gives an update on the situation in Iran and analyses how the supposed leaders of the opposition are failing to confront the Iranian Regime. Full text at link. Some of the founding ideologues of the Islamic Republic of Iran are currently in exile, having fallen foul of the current leadership, and, together with royalists, they represent the most backward sections of the opposition. Yet they have been given unprecedented coverage by the international media, including, worst of all, sections of the Farsi-speaking media. First we have Akbar Ganji, promoter of a New York hunger strike and a man portrayed in the US media as a “human rights activist” who talks of Islam and democracy. An ironic description for someone who founded, and was a commander of, the dreaded Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) and who played an active role in some of the worst mass executions of leftist and socialists under the Islamic regime. ... read full story / add a comment
international / rights, freedoms and repression Friday July 31, 2009 - 20:42 by Susan Boyle
 2 comments (last - thursday september 10, 2009 - 01:06)
Bolivia has broke ground in the articulation and assertion of rights many times in the last years & not only since Evo Morales was elected as popular leader of a Bolivarian style regime. & this week, in what must be welcome news to Irish Animal rights activists, law have been passed which define the use of animals in circus as "cruel & unusual". ... read full story / add a comment
national / history and heritage Friday July 31, 2009 - 15:18 by history buff
3 comments (last - friday january 07, 2011 - 16:23)
An article on Irish anarchism in the 1880s by historian Fintan Lane that was published in the March/April 2008 issue of History Ireland. ... read full story / add a comment
international / rights, freedoms and repression Friday July 31, 2009 - 14:42 by Hypatia
Here are extracts from a statement by 42 Arab Human Rights Organisations. They make clear their solidarity with the Iranian People and their opposition to the repression carried out by the Iranian Regime. Full text at link. We, the undersigned human rights organizations and advocates from the Arab region, express our condemnation of the brutal repression undertaken by the Iranian authorities against the Iranian people involved in peaceful demonstrations and protests against the course and outcome of the Iranian presidential elections. The repressive acts led to the death of dozens and the detention of thousands, including members of political opposition, journalists, workers and human rights defenders. The detainees have been subject to maltreatment and torture intended to force them to make false confessions or to give statements to be broadcast by the state media to distort the image of the popular uprising. The Iranian government has used the latter statements to support its fallacious claim that any dissonance or upheaval around the elections is merely the result of a foreign ploy to target Iran. ... read full story / add a comment
international / miscellaneous Thursday July 30, 2009 - 16:13 by Bazooka Joe
Fighting continued for a second day on Wednesday between Iraqi soldiers and members of an Iranian opposition group whose camp was stormed Tuesday on orders from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.The US is obligated to the MEK (People's Mujahedin of Iran, Mujaheddin-e Khalq) because it provided information about Iran's nuclear program and because US officials promised to protect them after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. MEK member Behzad Saffari said that Iraqi troops were stopping injured people going to hospitals outside the group's camp Ashraf. ... read full story / add a comment
international / rights, freedoms and repression Thursday July 30, 2009 - 13:34 by Committee for protection of Ashraf
On Tuesday, Iraqi police attacked Camp Ashraf in Iraq, where 3500 Iranian opposition live. They are unarmed and have no way of defending themselves. The Iraqi police have opened fire on the residents as well beating them with batons, sticks and running them over with humvees donated by the coalition forces. ... read full story / add a comment
international / anti-war / imperialism Wednesday July 29, 2009 - 16:24 by redjade
7 comments (last - thursday july 30, 2009 - 23:02) 1 image
Ireland has agreed to accept two inmates from the Guantanamo prison camp in Cuba, Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern announced Wednesday. ... read full story / add a comment
international / gender and sexuality Wednesday July 29, 2009 - 11:02 by Hypatia
Amnesty reports on the situation in Nicaragua where pregnant women are being refused necessary medical treatment. This has led to an increase in maternal deaths. Full story at link. Nicaragua’s total ban on abortions is endangering the lives of girls and women, denying them life-saving treatment, preventing health professionals from practicing effective medicine and contributing to an increase in maternal deaths across the country, concludes Amnesty International in a new report issues on Monday. According to official figures, 33 girls and women have died in pregnancy this year as compared to 20 in the same period last year. Amnesty International believes these figures are only a minimum as the government itself has acknowledged that the number of maternal deaths is under-recorded. ... read full story / add a comment
international / environment Wednesday July 29, 2009 - 10:11 by G
From the New Internationalist Website: http://blog.newint.org/editors/2009/07/21/blades-of-glo...ments ... read full story / add a comment
international / miscellaneous Monday July 27, 2009 - 16:28 by Michel Chossudovsky
"What is happening is that the widespread incidence of the common flu is being used to generate the reports delivered to the WHO pertaining to the H1N1 swine flu. Nonetheless, in the tabulated release of country level data, the WHO uses the term: "number of laboratory-confirmed cases", while also admitting that the cases are, in many cases, not confirmed." ... read full story / add a comment
wicklow / rights, freedoms and repression Sunday July 26, 2009 - 11:34 by Abuse victim by member of the Catholic Church
16 comments (last - sunday november 08, 2009 - 16:27) 2 images
When one member of the Clergy in the Irish Roman Catholic Church can have another threatened for assisting a member of the laity what more does it take to prove there is still a very unhealthy link between An Garda Siochana and the Roman Catholic Church. ... read full story / add a comment
international / eu Thursday July 23, 2009 - 00:40 by hogworts
5 comments (last - friday august 14, 2009 - 19:57)
The site of the former Hotel Gerhus in the village of Fassberg in the German state of Lower Saxony is now squatted by a neoNazi group loyal to the far-right German NPD deputy leader Jürgen Rieger. Although the building is in receivership, and despite the little village never reportedly having had the pleasure of a squat or social centre before, the 8000 metre squared piece of real estate is now breaking news in the German language. A mostly ignored press statement issued by Rieger last Friday announced his activists would occupy the premises after a leasing deal went sour (for the nazi's) & they felt they were being ripped off by someone in the estate agents' sector for offering them the space. Accordingly in the last 24 hours German NeoNazi's have indeed occupied the site - with the intention of turning the 70+ plus bedroomed building into a "training, educational & political revival" centre. ... read full story / add a comment 
international / eu Tuesday July 21, 2009 - 13:51 by Sheilanagig
1 image
If the Lisbon Treaty passes in Ireland, the EU will be ruled by the likes of Tony Blair if France and England have their way. ... read full story / add a comment
international / gender and sexuality Monday July 20, 2009 - 10:45 by Lillian Hellman
2 comments (last - saturday august 08, 2009 - 14:52)
This is the story of the rape and murder of another young Iranian who was protesting for justice. Full story at link. On Friday June 19, a large group of mourners gathered at the Ghoba mosque in Tehran to await a speech about the martyrs of the post-election protests by presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. According to one Iranian blog, 28-year-old Taraneh Mousavi was one of a group of people that was arrested by plainclothesed security forces for attending the gathering. Weeks later her mother received an anonymous call from a government agent saying that her daughter has been hospitalized in Imam Khomeini Hospital in the city of Karaj, just north of Tehran -- hospitalized for "rupturing of her womb and anus in... an unfortunate accident". ... read full story / add a comment
international / environment Saturday July 18, 2009 - 16:25 by Ann Garrison
July 16th, 2009, marked the 30th anniversary of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, when, at 5:00 A.M., 1100 tons of uranium mining tailings, and 100 million gallons of radioactive water burst through United Nuclear's earthen dam, into the Rio Puerco, at a uranium mine in Church Rock, New Mexico, on the Navajo Reservation. Today, the Navajo Nation remains under toxic siege, by coal mining, uranium mining, and coal-fired power, even though an EPA doc already suggests that the entire reservation is a Superfund site. The Navajo Tribal Council, in 2005, passed a uranium mining ban, the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act, and thus won a Nuclear Free Future Award, but the ban has been under pressure ever since, and uranium mining claims now surround the Navajo Reservation like an advancing army. ... read full story / add a comment 
international / gender and sexuality Friday July 17, 2009 - 22:42 by + "ora pro nobis"
2 comments (last - saturday july 18, 2009 - 10:46) 2 images
Those interested in Roman Kathurlick affairs will this last week have noted how the pontiff and german shepherd, Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI snubbed Berlusconi during the G8 bash in Italy but managed to give Obama a cuddle despite the former being anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-cell-stem research (& simply into good looking young girls) & the latter being a protestant. Then the Pope went off on holidays to get out of Rome which is a smelly and oppressive place during the summer months & broke his wrist, an incident reported throughout the global catholic interest press. But at the same time the official Vatican newspaper decided to "rehabilitate" Oscar Wilde. ... read full story / add a comment 
national / miscellaneous Friday July 17, 2009 - 22:33 by Plebian
6 comments (last - wednesday december 16, 2009 - 22:27) 1 image
[here's an interesting profile on Colm McCarthy from the Phoenix, and published here in the national interest] ECONOMIST Colm McCarthy has been selected as the man to make sensible, ie swingeing, cuts in public expenditure as chairman of the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure (‘An Bord Snip Nua’). But as ministers agonise about the wisdom of even allowing the public to know what’s in McCarthy’s report, there is no debate about McCarthy’s credentials or judgment in these matters. ... read full story / add a comment
national / anti-capitalism Thursday July 16, 2009 - 23:34 by Socialism or Barbarism!
A brief snippet of a detailed analysis of the report of 'An Bord Snip Nua'. ... read full story / add a comment |
|
|
