Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Central African Republic”
From historic convictions to impunity for gang rapes, 2016 has been a year of highs and lows when it comes to efforts to stem violence against women. The annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence (November 25-December 10) are a time to take stock of progress and failings in combatting this pervasive human rights abuse. In March, the International Criminal Court …
he world’s largest land animal, the biggest fish, the bird with the greatest wingspan, the largest primate: all are sliding towards extinction at astounding speed. If we will not protect such magnificent species, what are we prepared to do? In just seven years, 30% of Africa’s savannah elephants have been wiped out. The other African sub-species, the forest elephant, has crashed by …
“How is it that the Superpower of Policing and Prosecution seems to fear a confrontation with groups with names like the Oregon Bearded Bastards?” The armed right-wing activists that seized control of a federal wildlife sanctuary compound in eastern Oregon have already committed – and conspired to commit – enough serious criminal violations of U.S. law to land each of …
In Episode 84 David discusses the genocide of indigenous people in Canada with James Daschuk, an associate professor in the faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada. Despite Canada’s reputation as a polite and kind society, its treatment of its native population is as shocking as in other colonizing nations. Recently Canada has completed an investigation into its residential schools, which were used to destroy native culture under the guise of providing a standard education, and that resulted in physical and sexual abuse, opportunities for biomedical experimentation, and even starvation. This led to the destruction of native families and a continuing cycle of dysfunctional families, alcoholism, drug abuse and imprisonment. Canada is also about to start an investigation into the shocking number of women, mostly indigenous, mostly poor, often drug addicts or sex workers, who disappeared without authorities bothering to search for them. The most notorious of these was the case of Robert Pickton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pickton), who confessed to killing 49 women in the Vancouver area. Finally, David and James delve into the history of the colonization of the prairies, the broken treaties, and the Indian Act that relegated natives to a child-like legal status, that James describes as apartheid.
You can find out more by reading Daschuk’s 2013 book “Clearing the Plains” that was a surprise bestseller in Canada and has won several awards: http://www.uofrpress.ca/publications/Clearing-The-Plains
Another surprise bestseller is the book of recollections of an elderly Cree man about growing up in a residential school, recommended by Daschuk: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/residential-school-survivors-memoir-details-decade-of-utter-cruelty/article23556082/
An article on biomedical experiments in the 1940s and 1950s that took advantage of the under-nourishment at residential schools, and even prolonged it, can be found at: https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/histoire_sociale_social_history/v046/46.91.mosby.html
GENEVA— The U.N. refugee agency warns the number of people forcibly displaced from their homes is likely to exceed 60 million in 2015. The UNHCR has released its Mid-Year Trends 2015 report covering global forced displacement during the first six months of this year. The UNHCR report does not include the hundreds of thousands of refugees who made the perilous …
For the 12th year in a row, Norway has earned the honor of being listed as the best country in the world to live. The ranking appears in the United Nations Development Programme’s 2015 Human Development Report. The agency uses the Human Development Index (HDI) to score nearly 200 countries on factors including life expectancy at birth, average years of schooling, …
Europe, the small tail end peninsula of the great Euro-Asian land mass, gears up to receive the brunt of a mass migration of peoples from the South and East fleeing from the wars raging in their worlds. The United Nations Refugee Agency predicts some 800,000 arrivals of “seekers of asylum” in the remaining months of 2015. Estimates of the numbers …
Saudi Arabia’s relations with the United Nations have hit rock bottom after a series of incidents that has left a humbled Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon furious with Riyadh, two U.N. officials close to the U.N. chief have told me. The relationship matters because only the United Nations has the reputation of neutrality necessary to forge a power-sharing deal that can finally …
Over the year, I realized that the term ‘left’ is not exclusive to a political ideology, but a mode of thinking championed mostly by self-tailored ‘leftist’ western intellectuals. I grew to dislike it with intensity. But that has not always been the case. My father was a communist, or so he called himself. He read the translated work of great …
As wars and persecution escalate worldwide, one out of every 122 people on the planet is a refugee, seeking asylum, or internally displaced, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported Thursday. Taken together, this population of humans wrenched from their homes by violence would constitute the 24th largest country in the world. The agency’s new report, Global …
