Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has let Mr José Miguel Vivanco, the Director of Human Rights Watch for the Americas, know how highly appreciated by the Venezuelan Government is Vivanco’s work denouncing human rights violations and monitoring the Chavez government’s mistreatment of human rights activists, the political opposition and the judiciary in

> May of 2008
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> New Statement from Assata!!
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> First of all, let me say thank you, to the many people who
> have helped me to celebrate my 60th birthday. Thank you for
> your beautiful birthday cards and for your warm and eloquent
> messages. Thank you for your activism, your radiant energy
> and most of all for your love. I am sincerely grateful for

As the conflict in Darfur continues claiming victims whose stories and numbers are both horrific and threatening, the international community cannot figure out how to respond effectively to this situation of gross violations of human rights.

Federal officials stated this week that Steven Sabock, a 50 year old mental patient at a hospital in Goldsboro, North Carolina, died in April of this year after being left alone in a chair in the hospital for close to a full day with no one giving him any food or even helping him to use the bathroom. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iggZ1aEXm3lTMnUbwda1P2M10... An Associated Press article by Whitney Woodward found that Mr. Sabock apparently died in Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro, a hospital less than an hour away from Raleigh, NC, in April of this year from choking on medicine after being left in a chair unattended to for 22 hours, while video surveillance cameras revealed hospital personnel playing card games and watching television only a few feet away.

Help The Arc Fight Offensive Portrayal of People with Intellectual Disabilities

August 8, 2008
Background

Tropic Thunder is an action/adventure/comedy scheduled for nationwide release on August 13 and promises to be one of the blockbusters of the summer. DreamWorks is the film's producer and Paramount is its distributor. The premier will be held in Los Angeles, California on Monday, August 11.

The film features popular actors Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black as self-absorbed actors filming a big-budget war movie on location. Through a series of freak occurrences, they are forced to become the soldiers they are portraying.

After a whirlwind two days of travel from Ireland to San Francisco (via London and New York layovers) followed by San Francisco to Phnom Penh (via Hong Kong), I have finally arrived in Cambodia. My friend Hemly Ordonez, who has been working at a number of NGOs since June, met me at the airport with Somol, one of the students from Friends Help Friends for Development who is now enrolled in university in the capital.

An article posted on the CNN website today revealed that previously secret memoranda publicly released today, which had been obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, showed that the US Department of Justice worked hand in hand with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to justify methods of interrogation that were historically recognized as torture.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/24/cia.torture/index/html 

The judge presiding over a military tribunal at Guantanamo against a man allegedly a driver of Osama Bin Laden, threw out statements which had been made by the defendant under "highly coercive" conditions.  The judge also decided at the trial that he will not allow evidence gathered under such circumstances unless those who gathered such evidence were present for cunter interrogation.

Like most people I don’t think of girls as brides, unless they are wearing a costume for Halloween or a school play. However an article in the New York Times this week, “Tiny Voices Defy Child Marriage in Yemen”http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/world/middleeast/29marriage.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=yemen&st=cse&oref=slogin made me aware that girl brides are part of the reality of several countries in the world, and that for these girl brides life is not a game but a painful reality.

Society has failed the mentally ill over and over again. Only today in the media there was a story of a woman in New York who had been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility who died after falling to the floor in the emergency room of the psychiatric hospital and laying there unattended. A videotape revealed that numerous employees of the facility saw her lying on the ground convulsing and then motionless but no one did anything to help her for over an hour. The woman had been forcibly taken to such facility 24 hours before yet had received no treatment at the facility.