A British homeless charity is being threatened with prosecution if it continues to serve hot food to homeless people. Hull City Council's environmental health officials have contacted Hull Homeless Outreach to say they are breaching food hygiene regulations by serving the food at St Mary's Church in Lowgate.
Without a working kitchen, the local authority insists there are concerns over the potential for food poisoning. Now, Hull Homeless Outreach can only serve tea, coffee and tinned soup, serving its last hot meal this week. Sarah Hemingway, of the charity, fears for the welfare of the city's homeless population. She said: "Environmental health called us out of the blue to tell us we couldn't serve hot food anymore because we don't meet the criteria. They told us they would prosecute if we carried on.
"We have been providing curries and sausage casseroles, which are cooked by our volunteers at home. "Now we are not even allowed to provide sandwiches made by volunteers. This has left us deeply frustrated, as about 50 people come to our soup kitchen on each of the two nights we are here. For some, this is the only chance of a hot meal they get each week. How can us serving this food be any worse than them having to rummage around bins for something to eat? This is a lifeline for our homeless population."
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey's incumbent president and past prime minister, struggles to escape the shadow of modern Turkey's founder. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk looms large over his country's past, present and future. It is hard to dismantle the figure, the legacy and the lasting authority of Atatürk, very much to Erdoğan's dismay, especially as Erdoğan seeks to radically redefine the country -- from the place of religion in society to a reform of the constitution, including a shift to a presidential system.
For a short moment, a few months ago, it seemed as if Erdoğan had received help from an unlikely source: Adolf Hitler. Hitler and his national socialists were big fans of Atatürk and his "New Turkey" -- so much so that they instituted a minor cult around the Turkish leader in the Third Reich. Hitler's dictum that Atatürk and the Turkish nationalist movement had been his shining star in the darkness of the democratic Weimar Republic in the 1920s, became the official line of the Third Reich.
Reactions in Turkey were not only immediate but also quite positive, primarily newspapers close to the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) -- Erdoğan's party -- that seemed interested in discussing Nazi fandom of Atatürk as a means to discredit Atatürk and his project.
Blanca Canales
Blanca Canales was a Puerto Rican Nationalist who helped organize the Daughters of Freedom, the women’s branch of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. She was one of the few women in history to have led a revolt against the United States, known as the Jayuya Uprising. In 1948, a severely restricting bill known as the Gag Bill, or Law 53, was introduced that made it a crime to print, publish, sell, or exhibit any material intended to paralyze or destroy the insular government. In response, the Nationalists starting planning armed revolution. On October 30, 1950, Blanca and others took up arms which she had stored in her home and marched into the town of Jayuya, taking over the police station, burning down the post office, cutting the telephone wires, and raising the Puerto Rican flag in defiance of the Gag Law. As a result, the US President declared martial law and ordered Army and Air Force attacks on the town. The Nationalists held on for awhile, but were arrested and sentenced to life in prison after 3 days. Much of Jayuya was destroyed, and the incident was not fairly covered by US media, with the US President even saying it was “an incident between Puerto Ricans.”
9 more Female Revolutionaries That You Probably Didn't Learn About at Films For Action
Where You Can Freely Abduct a Woman
In Malta and Lebanon, crimes are literally erased once the offender marries the victim. For instance, in Malta, if a kidnapper “after abducting a person, shall marry such person, he shall not be liable to prosecution,” the law says. If the marriage occurs after a trial and conviction, the abductor’s sentence will immediately be wiped. Similarly, in Lebanon, crimes including rape and kidnapping, will be halted at the time of marriage. If there’s divorce within five years of a felony crime, the prosecution or penalty can resume.
Similar abominable laws were overthrown in Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Peru and Uruguay, in the past decade.
It’s Legal for Women to Be Beaten
In Nigeria, violence “by a husband for the purpose of correcting his wife” is considered lawful. Violence is similarly allowed if a parent or schoolmaster is punishing a child, or a “master for the purpose of correcting his servant.”
Where It’s Illegal for Women to Do Labor
In China, women can’t “work down the pit of mines,” or do difficult physical labor, or, specifically, “other work that female workers should avoid.” Similar laws are repeated in books across the globe—making for a totally geographically diverse triangle. In Madagascar, women cannot be employed at night in an “industrial establishment” unless it’s the family business. And Russian lawmakers decided that “labor of females on hard, dangerous and/or unhealthy trades...is forbidden.” This sweeping statement covers 456 different types of work, including driving trains, carpenting, frontline firefighting, and sailing.
India has asked YouTube to remove all links to a controversial documentary about the gang rape and murder of a woman in Delhi after banning its broadcast, a government official told Reuters on Thursday.
Leslee Udwin's "India's Daughter" features an interview with Mukesh Singh, one of four men sentenced to death for the rape and torture of a 23-year-old woman on a moving bus in December 2012.
Comments released to the media show that Singh blames the victim for the crime. He says that women are more responsible than men for rape.
"We just forwarded the court order and asked them (YouTube) to comply," an official at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology told Reuters.
While the vast majority of Americans consider themselves unprejudiced, many of us unintentionally make snap judgments about people based on what we see—whether it’s race, age, gender, religion, sexuality, or disability. This may be a significant reason many people in the U.S. report they feel discriminated against. Subconscious prejudice—called “implicit bias”—has profound implications for how we view and interact with others who are different from us. It can hinder a person’s ability to find a job, secure a loan, rent an apartment, or get a fair trial, perpetuating disparities in American society. The Love Has No Labels campaign challenges us to open our eyes to our bias and prejudice and work to stop it in ourselves, our friends, our families, and our colleagues. Rethink your bias at lovehasnolabels.com.
"Indian authorities ordered television stations Tuesday not to broadcast a documentary about a gang rape on a New Delhi bus in which one of the attackers blames the victim and says she could have avoided being killed if she had not fought back, a government official said.
The order followed an outcry over giving a convicted prisoner a nationwide platform to express repugnant views about a horrific crime that shocked Indians and prompted hundreds of thousands to take to the streets in protest. In response to the 2012 attack, India's government rushed through legislation doubling prison terms for rapists to 20 years and criminalizing voyeurism, stalking and the trafficking of women.” *
The Prime Minister of Israel was gifted the opportunity to launch a scathing attack on the foreign policy of the United States, in the US Congress, against the wishes of the American President – and won 25 near-hysterical standing ovations for doing so. After Republican Speaker John Boehner invited the Israeli PM to speak (just two weeks before Israeli elections) without consulting the White House, it was announced that President Obama, Vice President Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry would snub Netanyahu’s speech and visit. All-in-all, 55 Democrat lawmakers boycotted the speech.
Nevertheless, a packed Congress threw down the red carpet for Netanyahu today, while he lobbied American lawmakers to block the foreign policy efforts of their own President. Blow-by-blow, Netanyahu pilloried Obama’s negotiations with Iran. He hectored the President like a school principal scolding an errant child. There was zero respect shown to the Office of the US President, or the diplomatic relationship between the nations.
“This is a bad deal — a very bad deal. We’re better off without it,” Netanyahu told Congress, and got a standing ovation.
“It paves Iran’s path to a bomb,”
“The battle between Iran and ISIS doesn’t turn Iran into a friend of America. … the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.”
But it wasn’t just President Obama that Netanyahu threw shade upon today. The Israeli PM also echoed a distasteful trope – common in modern, muscular Israeli society – that victims of the Nazi holocaust were too weak
In a country where government censorship shuts down critical voices, how did former journalist Chai Jing break through to reach over 100 million people?
She brought the story home with a message any parent can relate to.
For Jing, the story started in Shanxi, a place that was famous for its vinegar. These days, Shanxi is famous for something else: It's considered one of the most polluted places in the world, a result of its massive coal mining operations. But people in China aren't as surprised to hear about the effects of pollution there anymore.
The murder of Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov on Friday has once again highlighted the grim fates that have befallen several of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics, from radiation poisoning to imprisonment.
A day after tens of thousands of people marched in Moscow to honour Nemtsov’s memory, FRANCE 24 takes a look at some of the more high-profile cases of Putin opponents who have met with cruel – and sometimes bizarre – ends.
Boris Nemtsov: Nemtsov was a leader of the Republican Party of Russia/People's Freedom Party, a liberal opposition group. He rose to prominence in 1997 after he was named deputy premier by Russia’s first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin, and was once seen as a possible Yeltsin heir. But that honour went to Putin in 2000, with Nemtsov serving as a deputy MP in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house, during Putin’s first term.
As Putin tightened his grip, however, Nemtsov became a prominent anti-corruption activist and a vocal critic of Putin’s government. In February 2008, he co-authored a report entitled "What 10 Years of Putin Have Brought" that detailed how many of Putin’s friends and supporters had become billionaires under his rule while the majority of Russians suffered under growing social inequality and a failing pension system. Similar reports followed in subsequent years criticising Putin’s policies.
In a 2011 interview, Nemtsov called critics of Putin’s government “patriots”. “I love Russia and want the best for her, so for me criticising Putin is a very patriotic activity because these people are leading Russia to ruin,” Nemtsov said in an interview republished Saturday on the Meduza news site. “Everybody who supports them, in fact, supports a regime that is destroying the country, and so they are the ones who hate Russia. And those who criticise this regime, those who fight against it, they are the patriots.”
Meduza said that before his death Nemtsov was working on a report that alleges that the Russian “volunteers” who are fighting in eastern Ukraine are acting on direct orders from the Kremlin. In an interview with Russia's Sobesednik news website on February 10, Nemtsov expressed his enmity for Putin and offered a sombre prediction. "I'm afraid Putin will kill me. I believe that he was the one who unleashed the war in the Ukraine. I couldn't dislike him more," he said.
More of Putin opponents who have met with cruel and bizarre ends at France 24
JaclynGlenn finally gets a chance to really piss off the Westboro Baptist Church with Brick Stone!
Part 2