Aerial footage shows the scale of migration at the Slovenian-Croatian border, where hundreds of refugees are seen crossing farmland on foot on Sunday.
25 Oct 2015
24 Oct 2015
The vanished: the Filipino domestic workers who disappear behind closed doors
According to the United Nation’s International Labour Organisation, domestic workers are some of the most likely to face abuse and exploitation in their place of work. A number of cases in the past few weeks have made international headlines: an Indian domestic worker who had her arm chopped off, allegedly by her employer when she asked for her wages; a Saudi diplomat who reportedly tortured and raped his Nepalese domestic workers; another Saudi man videoed apparently molesting his foreign maid as she worked in the family kitchen. But these are just the stories we hear about; there are many more cases, documented by human rights groups, in which women have been gang-raped, burned with oil, starved, mutilated with acid or literally worked to death.
In the Gulf, the International Trade Union Confederation says that 2.4 million domestic workers are facing conditions of slavery. Yet moving abroad to find work as a domestic worker is a calculated risk that millions of women such as Marilyn take every year. For a largely invisible workforce, domestic workers wield serious economic clout. Collectively, they account for 4% of total global employment and nearly 8% of total female employment. There are 1.5 million domestic workers in Saudi Arabia alone, and recruitment agencies fly in 40,000 women a month to keep up with demand. Muslim women from the Philippines are considered the highest calibre of workers in many richer households.
Uyghur Families Colonize Syrian Village
Uyghurs fighting alongside ISIS and Jabhat Al-Nusra in Syria. A Syrian village was being transformed into "a settlement for hundreds of Uyghur Turkistani families who are fleeing China,"
23 Oct 2015
22 Oct 2015
The Aceh War 1873-1914
The Aceh War, also known as the Dutch War or the Infidel War (1873-1914), was an armed military conflict between the Sultanate of Aceh and the Netherlands which was triggered by discussions between representatives of Aceh and the U.S. in Singapore during early 1873. The war was part of a series of conflicts in the late 19th century that consolidated Dutch rule over modern-day Indonesia, concurrent with the 1906 and the 1908 interventions in Bali.
Missing Romans in China
Sun Jun, who believes his fair complexion may indicate his ancestors were Roman soldiers who settled in the Hexi Corridor in Gansu province, China more than 2000 years ago.
The area’s link with Rome was first suggested by a professor of Chinese history at Oxford in the 1950s. Homer Dubs pulled together stories from the official histories, which said that Liqian was founded by soldiers captured in a war between the Chinese and the Huns in 36BC, and the legend of the missing army of Marcus Crassus, a Roman general.
In 53BC Crassus was defeated disastrously and beheaded by the Parthians, a tribe occupying what is now Iran, putting an end to Rome’s eastward expansion. But stories persisted that 145 Romans were taken captive and wandered the region for years. Prof Dubs theorised that they made their way as a mercenary troop eastwards, which was how a troop “with a fish-scale formation” came to be captured by the Chinese 17 years later.
He said the “fish-scale formation” was a reference to the Roman “tortoise”, a phalanx protected by shields on all sides and from above. Gu Jianming, who lives near Liqian, said it had come as a surprise to be told he might be descended from a European imperial army. But then the birth of his daughter was also a surprise. Gu Meina, now six, was born with a shock of blonde hair. “We shaved it off a month after she was born but it just grew back the same colour,” he said. “At school they call her ‘yellow hair’. Before we were told about the Romans, we had no idea about this. We are poor and have no family temple, so we don’t know about our ancestors.”
Hitler only wanted to deport Jews
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of "trivialising the Holocaust" by saying Hitler only wanted to deport Jews. Netanyahu claimed the Nazi leader, who presided over the systemic killing of six million Jews, was only talked into carrying out the genocide by a Palestinian nationalist who said Jews would emigrate to the Middle East unless they were killed.
The chief executive of the world's only Jewish state told The 37th Zionist Congress: "Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel them, they'll all come here.' "So what should I do with them?" he asked. He said, 'Burn them.'" Opposition leader Isaac Herzog demanded Netanyahu retract the comments, saying: "This is a dangerous distortion of history that trivialises the Holocaust."
21 Oct 2015
The secret US prisons you've never heard of before
Investigative journalist Will Potter is the only reporter who has been inside a Communications Management Unit, or CMU, within a US prison. These units were opened secretly, and radically alter how prisoners are treated — even preventing them from hugging their children. Potter, a TED Fellow, shows us who is imprisoned here, and how the government is trying to keep them hidden. "The message was clear," he says. "Don’t talk about this place." Find sources for this talk at willpotter.com/cmu
Eritrean envoy to Israel calls for arrest of lynch mob
Haftom Zarhum, a 29-year-old Eritrean migrant, died in a Beersheba hospital on Sunday night after he, mistaken for an accomplice of a suspected attacker that killed an Israeli soldier, was shot by a security guard and kicked by bystanders. A video published online following the incident purported to show the Eritrean being kicked by several people as he lay bleeding on the ground.
Israeli police have not yet made any arrests two days after the incident. The private security guard who shot the unarmed Eritrean was questioned by the police and later released, Israeli police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld said. “We have arrested no one at this point, but we are still looking for people for questioning over this incident," Rosenfeld told Al Jazeera.
Footage released online from the bus station clearly showed faces of some of those who participated in the lynching, which Al Jazeera’s reporter in Israel Elias Karram said, included two Israeli officers. Moreover, an Israeli man, in an appearance on Israeli Channel Two on Monday evening, said that he had been one of those who kicked Zarhum. It remains unclear if Israeli authorities questioned the Israeli man or took any action against him. Footage from the station showed at least one Israeli soldier kicking Zarhum in the head as he lay bleeding on the floor of the terminal. Another man lifted a bench and dropped it on Zarhum's head as another tried to protect him by placing a bar stool over his body.
More at Al Jazeera English – Also see nydailynews.com
18 Oct 2015
17 Oct 2015
Inside Saudi Arabia: Butchery, Slavery & History of Revolt
Meet the new head of the United Nations panel on Human Rights: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Abby Martin takes us inside the brutal reality of this police-state monarchy, and tells the untold people's history of resistance to it. With a major, catastrophic war in Yemen and looming high-profile executions of activists, The Empire Files exposes true nature of the U.S.-Saudi love affair.
Sea Gypsies
The Bajau tribe are nomadic sea gypsies. They can be found in South East Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, with numbers around 100,000. Traditionally, the Bajau, even today, live mostly on the sea. Back in the 1960's all Bajau lived on houseboats, cooking and washing their clothes, etc until the pirates came.......
16 Oct 2015
It's Euro Dismaland!
Material from Banksy's Dismaland theme park has been used to create shelters for migrants in the Calais refugee camp. Makeshift huts have started to spring up in 'Dismalaid' using timber from Banksy's 'bemusement park' which closed last month. The shelters are being built inside 'The Jungle' where 6,000 refugees displaced from countries including Syria, Libya and Eritrea are camped.
The Drone Papers
The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars.
In the "Drone Papers," The Intercept reveals drone strikes have resulted from unreliable intelligence, stemming in large part from electronic communications data, or "signals intelligence," that officials acknowledge is insufficient. The documents also undermine government claims that the drone strikes have been precise.
14 Oct 2015
David Starkey about why Islam is Primitive and Backwards
David Starkey educates Mehdi Hasan on Free Speech & "backward Islam".
13 Oct 2015
Price-Gouging The Sick So Shareholders Can Get Richer: That’s Capitalism!
The unethical greed of pharmaceutical companies has recently taken center stage in public discourse following the decision of vulture capitalist Martin Shkreli’s decision to jack up the price of a vital AIDS drug by 5,000% (which he has still failed to rescind), but the problem extends much further than the widely reviled “pharma bro.” Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has spearheaded congressional investigations into the matter, targeting Valeant Pharmaceuticals for their shameless use of similar price hikes.
J. Michael Pearson, CEO of Valeant, readily admits that his company is in it solely for profits, even though they deal in life-saving medications. “[If] products are sort of mispriced and there’s an opportunity, we will act appropriately in terms of doing what I assume our shareholders would like us to do” said Pearson in an interview with CNBC. “My primary responsibility is to Valeant shareholders. We can do anything we want to do. We will continue to make acquisitions, we will continue to move forward.”
Since Pearson took over stewardship of the company, “Valeant has acquired more than 100 drugs and seen their stock price rise more than 1,000 percent with Pearson at the helm…Already this year, they have increased the price of 56 of the drugs in its portfolio an average of 66 percent, highlighted by their recent acquisition, Zegerid, which they promptly raised 550 percent.” reports US UNCUT.
12 Oct 2015
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