War on Drugs. The Battle for Net Freedom. Unreported World - Episode Guide. In war-torn Gaza, 'Location, Location, Location' means finding an apartment in one of the highly sought-after areas that are usually not shelled or hit by missiles. Reporter Seyi Rhodes and producer Daniel Bogado examine what must be one of the world's most unlikely property booms. They meet Essam Mortja, an estate agent and property developer who says his property business is booming. He shows them some of the glitzy properties he's helped sell at prices of up to US $3 million. Property prices for luxury villas and apartments in elite areas like El Remal are on par with London and New York. The area is right by the sea and has stunning views, but there's one other reason why the prices are so high.
It's where the UN building is located, which means Israeli planes are less likely to bomb the area. Israel did bomb the UN HQ in 2009 but it caused an outcry - and property prices show that Gazans think it is unlikely to happen again. Prices go up in any place with low supply and high demand. Sri Lanka's Killing Fields. Parental Control HistoryCloseSign in to get the most from 4oD History View your own personal 4oD history, useful if you share a computerKeep track of the last 50 shows you watched or started watchingResume unfinished shows from the point you stopped watching FavouritesCloseStart using Favourites today Look out for the add to Favourites button as you browse the siteUse the buttons to create a list of all your favourite showsNew 4oD episodes are flagged here so you don't miss out Sri Lanka's Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished FIRST BROADCAST: 10.55PM Wed 14 March 2012C4 Duration: 50:33 In 2011 Channel 4 exposed damning evidence of atrocities committed in the war in Sri Lanka.
The film forensically examines four specific cases and investigates who was responsible. This painstaking investigation traces ultimate responsibility up to the highest echelons of the chain of command, asking questions of both President Rajapaska and his brother, the Defence Secretary. More information {| merge_radio |} The Politics of Grief | Online Only.
Photo by Photosightfaces. In the case of September 11 2001, communal loss is – comparatively, at least – well understood. Everyone saw or could see those deaths; they were on the news even as they happened; the broadcast was part of their lasting tragedy. Few perceived denial of the deaths as rational. The people who had killed them made sure there was plenty of physical evidence. These deaths require, among other tasks, ongoing announcement and explanation – and because certain authorities have failed to fully acknowledge that the casualties occurred, saying I grieve means stating, repeatedly, I believe that they did. Before we ever came to this place, we heard reports of steady, gray fog – pale, opening clouds – late and sudden violent storms. Grief is a country that looks different to each person entering it, to be sure.
On the rare occasion that I stand under an umbrella, next to someone who already knows what happened, I feel a relief that I had never known before. Can the Government Suppress Lies? - Garrett Epps - National. People fib. But a current court case centers around whether laws can stop them. Reuters Here is Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit, on the way lying makes our world go around: Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying.
It's vintage Kozinski, mixing politics, pop culture, and self-mockery (how many times has Kozinski heard clerk applicants call him the greatest living judge?). As Kozinski vividly writes, the freedom to lie is at stake in United States v. Alvarez is a constitutional test of the Stolen Valor Act, a recent brainstorm of Congress.
To bring the Starrs and Bybees pecksniffing into our daily conversation, with subpoenas or worse, would make a mockery of free speech This brings us to the case of Xavier Alvarez, who somehow got himself elected to the Three Valleys Water District Board, headquartered in Claremont, California. What's on display here are two different views of the First Amendment. Alvarez was lying about himself. Reporting on a Gang Rape in East Texas. Twitter comments and a smart piece on Jezebel have been astutely criticizing this New York Times piece on the alleged gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in the East Texas town of Cleveland.
It’s a horrifying story. We’re told that a schoolgirl was raped by "18 young men and teenage boys" – 18 – in an abandoned trailer filled with "a filthy sofa … a broken stereo and some forlorn Christmas decorations. " Can you feel your pulse quickening as you imagine an elementary school kid held down and raped repeatedly in this sordid place? What do you do with that feeling? Here’s what Cleveland residents quoted in the Times story did: They speculated about what the girl had done to bring it on herself. Libby Copeland is a writer in New York and a regular Slate contributor. Follow The paper quotes them at face value: Residents "said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. The New York Times' Rape-Friendly Reporting. From today's New York Times: The police investigation began shortly after Thanksgiving, when an elementary school student alerted a teacher to a lurid cellphone video that included one of her classmates.The video led the police to an abandoned trailer, more evidence and, eventually, to a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys on charges of participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in the abandoned trailer home, the authorities said.
This story from Cleveland, Texas, is beyond horrifying. Obviously. Unfortunately, further injustices have now been heaped on the victim (and the movement to end rape culture) by the article's writer and editor. "Gang Rape of Schoolgirl, and Arrests, Shake Texas Town," the Times article covering the atrocities, is a collection of one perpetrator-excusing, victim-blaming insult after another. It starts right after the lede and some further information about the suspects, who include middle schoolers and a 27-year-old. Hmm. The Careless Language Of Sexual Violence. There are crimes and then there are crimes and then there are atrocities. These are, I suppose, matters of scale. I read an article in the New York Times about an eleven-year old girl who was gang raped by eighteen men in Cleveland, Texas. The levels of horror to this story are many, from the victim’s age to what is known about what happened to her, to the number of attackers, to the public response in that town, to how it is being reported.
There is video of the attack too, because this is the future. The unspeakable will be televised. The Times article was entitled, “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” as if the victim in question was the town itself. James McKinley Jr., the article’s author, focused on how the men’s lives would be changed forever, how the town was being ripped apart, how those poor boys might never be able to return to school. The overall tone of the article was what a shame it all was, how so many lives were affected by this one terrible event.
Gang-rape woman arrested during trial, following overdose - Courts, National News. Panetta, Gates, Rumsfeld Face New Suit Over U.S. Military Rape ‘Epidemic’ Famed as Sonic Youth’s bassist, Kim Gordon is also an accomplished visual artist who once did a watercolor of Blondie. She talks about life after the band—and the secrets of her artistic process. There is a certain school of thought that says Kim Gordon—"musician, vocalist, visual artist, record producer, video director, fashion designer, and actress," according to her ever-expanding Wikipedia entry—is the coolest person on the planet. Gordon, for her part, cannot possibly understand why anyone would think that, which has the effect, of course, of making her even cooler. On a recent Monday afternoon, the former Sonic Youth bassist was high in the hills above L.A.' "This turned out to be a perfect place," Gordon said as she gazed through a long bank of windows toward the green slopes below.
In Sonic Youth's 1994 video "Kool Thing," Gordon wore pink lipstick and silver hot pants and sang about "male, white, corporate oppression" over a squall of feedback. She laughed. Hans Magnus Enzensberger: The radical loser (01/12/2005. I. The isolated individual It is difficult to talk about the loser, and it is stupid not to. Stupid because there can be no definitive winner and because each of us, from the megalomaniac Bonaparte to the last beggar on the streets of Calcutta, will meet the same fate. Difficult because to content oneself with this metaphysical banality is to take an easy way out, as it ignores the truly explosive dimension of the problem, the political dimension. Instead of actually looking into the thousand faces of the loser, sociologists keep to their statistics: median value, standard deviation, normal distribution.
Those who content themselves with the objective, material criteria, the indices of the economists and the devastating findings of the empiricists, will understand nothing of the true drama of the radical loser. Since before the attack on the World Trade Center, political scientists, sociologists and psychologists have been searching in vain for a reliable pattern. II. III. Drinking the Kool-Aid: A Survivor Remembers Jim Jones - Jennie Rothenberg Gritz - National. Teri Buford O'Shea fled Jonestown three weeks before all its inhabitants committed suicide. Here, she explains why the tragedy should be a cautionary tale for everyday people. Teri Buford O'Shea On November 18, 1978, Jim Jones and more than 900 members of his People's Temple committed mass suicide in the jungle of Guyana.
Since that time, the event has occupied a grotesque but fringy place in American history. O'Shea was 19 years old when she joined the People's Temple in Redwood Valley, California. Forty years later, O'Shea is just beginning to speak openly about her seven years with Jim Jones, first in California and then at his compound in Guyana. As O'Shea tells it, Jones's idealism was a large part of what made him so lethal. O'Shea, who escaped just three weeks before the massacre, recently published a collection of poems and photographs called Jonestown Lullaby. You say that you want people to remember the good parts of Jonestown. What was good about Jonestown was not Jim Jones. How Police Interrogation Works" There are "Law & Order" addicts everywhere who think they could get a perp to confess.
A little glaring, some getting in the guy's face, a revelation that his fingerprints are all over the murder weapon and voilà! He's recounting his crime. In real life, police interrogation requires more than confidence and creativity (although those qualities do help) -- interrogators are highly trained in the psychological tactics of social influence. Getting someone to confess to a crime is not a simple task, and the fact that detectives sometimes end up with confessions from the innocent testifies to their expertise in psychological manipulation.
No two interrogations are alike, but most exploit certain weaknesses in human nature. Police interrogations weren't always so complex. While the Supreme Court had ruled as early as 1897 against involuntary confessions, it was in 1937 that things really started to change. When the case Miranda v. London’s burning: a mob made by the welfare state | Brendan O’Neill. Many commentators are on a mission to contextualise the riots that have swept parts of urban London and other British cities. ‘It’s very naive to look at these riots without the context’, says one journalist , who says the reason the violence kicked off in the London suburb of Tottenham is because ‘that area is getting 75% cuts [in public services]’. Others have said that the political context for the rioting is youth unemployment or working-class anger at David Cameron’s cuts agenda. ‘There is a context to London’s riots that can’t be ignored’, said a writer for the Guardian , and it is the ‘backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures’.
The ‘mass unrest’ is a protest against unhinged capitalism, apparently. These observers are right that there is a political context to the riots. What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. Article continues after advertisement But it’s more than childish destructiveness motivating the rioters. Rrupt and confused? This summer, the police faced the crises of phone hacking and riots. The force is changing, but in the wrong way The British police: a conservative institution that struggled to adjust to post-second world war change Images of police in full riot gear against a backdrop of burning buildings and marauding looters have seared themselves into the collective memory.
The riots, sparked by the police shooting of a man in Tottenham (a non-police-issue gun was found at the scene), have challenged the reputation of Britain’s constabularies. In so doing, they sharpened concerns about policing that emerged a month earlier during the News International phone-hacking scandal. These are the kind of events that can corrode long-term confidence in the police and shake the public sense of security. They have also undermined Britain’s international reputation. At the heart of policing is a set of defining tensions that have to be reconciled. Corruption in the police is not new. Civil disorder and looting hits Britain: We have been here before.
Why do police douse protesters with colored water? As Egypt prepares to mark the first anniversary of the Egyptian revolution on Wednesday, with activists mapping out protest routes and the ruling military council partially lifting the country's emergency laws and releasing prisoners in apparent goodwill gestures, Al-Masry Al-Youm is reporting something rather odd. Anonymous security sources tell the Egyptian newspaper that security forces are planning to use batons, loudspeakers, and "colored chemicals that will stain one's skin for six months" against "those perceived to be violating the law.
" It's the colored chemicals in particular that's gotten picked up by Twitter users in Egypt, generating a mixture of outrage ("colored chemicals you idiots?!!!!!) , humor ("so it's paint ball fight now? "), advice ("Vaseline reduces the effects of colored water") and skepticism ("if it's real we wouldn't be finding out about it a week beforehand"). Nevertheless, the approach is still employed frequently. But dyes have their drawbacks too. Britain's children: breaking with Convention. It has been three years since the UK was admonished for failing to comply with its obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The UN Committee responsible for the convention recommended that the UK government take ‘urgent measures’ to address a ‘general climate of intolerance and negative public attitudes towards children, especially adolescents’.
Yet it is fair to say that, since then, since then, the UK has failed to act on the Committee’s concerns. In fact, we have seen an escalation in negative public attitudes towards children and adolescents. There are four areas within the criminal justice system alone where the UK, in my opinion, is clearly in breach of the Convention. These relate to the age of criminal responsibility, the failure to protect anonymity, having children tried in adult courts and resorting to custody other than as a last resort.
The August riots provided a recent example of persisting negative attitudes to children. It’s Not India, Congo or Afghanistan: The Subjection of Women is Its Own Religion | Doug Saunders. Arms and Legs. In Broadway Market. Spark of Truth: Can Science Bring Justice to Arson Trials? | Materials Science. A Seismic Crime - Joel E. Cohen. California Seismologist Testifies Against Scientists in Italy Quake Manslaughter Trial. If You Can’t Notice a Gorilla in Plain Sight, How Can You Testify as a Witness? | The Crux. Neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga explains why some people may be born criminals.
The mystery of Carole Myers | Society | The Observer. The town that stood up to the mafia. The real CSI: what happens at a crime scene? | Science. Room for Everyone at The Hague. Concerning the Violent Peace-Police. Former BNP man uses copyright and libel laws to stifle “Nazi” picture. Fishing as Slaves on the High Seas. Khader Adnan and now-normalized Western justice. The Right to Tell Lies. Exclusive: Unsolved Mystery | The Wilderness Highway Where People Go Missing | Outdoor Adventure. Re-thinking detention without trial. Forensic failure: 'Miscarriages of justice will occur' - science-in-society - 08 February 2012. Arson and "Junk Science"
Fewer countries carrying out executions. Annual Death Penalty Report.pdf (application/pdf Object) Number of death penalty states declining but surge in executions in 2011. Science in court: Arrested development.