Snowden: US spied on human rights workers

Total NSA Bullshit

• Whistleblower Ed Snowden tells the Council of Europe that the NSA deliberately snooped on groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
• Three current items on the "evil" Human Rights Watch web site are:  Rights Abuses Continue in Fiji and Russia: Chechen Activist Leader Arrested, Beaten and China: Investigate Lawyers’ Torture Claims, Close Black Jails .

The US has spied on the staff of prominent human rights organizations, Edward Snowden has told the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Europe's top human rights body.

Giving evidence via a videolink from Moscow, Snowden said the National Security Agency – for which he worked as a contractor – had deliberately snooped on bodies like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

He told council members: "The NSA has specifically targeted either leaders or staff members in a number of civil and non-governmental organizations … including domestically within the borders of the United States." Snowden did not reveal which groups the NSA had bugged reports the UK Guardian.

The assembly asked Snowden if the US spied on the "highly sensitive and confidential communications" of major rights bodies such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, as well as on similar smaller regional and national groups. He replied: "The answer is, without question, yes. Absolutely."

In live testimony to the Council of Europe, Snowden also gave a forensic account of how the NSA's powerful surveillance programs violate the EU's privacy laws. He said programs such as XKeyscore, revealed by the Guardian last July, use sophisticated data mining techniques to screen "trillions" of private communications.

"This technology represents the most significant new threat to civil liberties in modern times," he declared.

XKeyscore allows analysts to search with no prior authorisation through vast databases containing emails, online chats, and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.

Snowden said on Tuesday that he and other analysts were able to use the tool to select an individual's metadata and content "without judicial approval or prior review".

The XKeyscore program amounted to an egregious form of mass surveillance, Snowden suggested, because it hoovered up data from "entire populations". Anyone using non-encrypted communications might be targeted on the basis of their "religious beliefs, sexual or political affiliations, transactions with certain businesses" and even "gun ownership", he claimed.

Snowden also criticised the British spy agency GCHQ. He cited the agency's Optic Nerve program revealed by the Guardian in February. It was, he said, one of many "abusive" examples of state snooping. Under the program GCHQ bulk collects images from Yahoo webcam chats.

Many of these images were "intensely private" Snowden said, depicting some form of nudity, and often taken from the "bedrooms and private homes" of people not suspected of individualised wrongdoing. "[Optic Nerve] continued even after GCHQ became aware that the vast majority had no intelligence value at all," Snowden said.

Snowden made clear he did believe in legitimate intelligence operations. "I would like to clarify I have no intention to harm the US government or strain [its] bilateral ties," he asserted, adding that he wanted to improve government, not bring it down.

The exiled American spy, however, said the NSA should abandon its electronic surveillance of entire civilian populations. Instead, he said, it should go back to the traditional model of eavesdropping against specific targets, such as "North Korea, terrorists, cyber-actors, or anyone else."

Islamists keep Turkish woman off a bus

Insane Islamists tell Turkish woman, "you are causing us to sin."


A Turkish woman claimed she was prevented from boarding a public bus by a group of Islamists because her outfit would "cause them to sin," according to a report by daily Evrensel.

Yağmur Yılmaz, 21, said she left home to go to work, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt reports Hurriyet Daily News.

Yılmaz said she walked to a stop in Istanbul's Edirnekapı district to get on a bus going to Fatih district, where she worked. A group of around 15 men and women clad in burqas, cloaks and turbans who were on the bus blocked Yılmaz's path, saying she could not get on the vehicle.

Yılmaz said she told the group it was everybody's right to board the bus, to which the women from the group replied, "We would sin if you get on this bus, you are causing us to sin."

The men in the group also harassed Yılmaz, she claimed, saying: "Look at her. Her head is not covered, shame!"

"Nobody in the bus did anything about it, not even the driver," Yılmaz said. "There were other 'uncovered' women waiting at the stop, but they just stood by idly."    (Hurriyet Daily News)

Slavery returns to Brazil

As many as 250,000 slaves in Brazil.
A farm producing charcoal at the border of the Amazon forest in Para state, Brazil. The Ministry of Labor has done almost nothing to assign responsibility for slavery cases in such farms to the pig-iron producers, as the charcoal is produced exclusively to supply these extremely profitable companies.

Modern Slavery in Brazil.  And no one goes to jail.

• Far from the trendy tourist beaches of Rio there is a hidden world of slavery helping to power the modern economy of Brazil.

In 2003 the International Labor Organization estimated that 25,000 Brazilians were  working in conditions it described as slavery.  Other groups put the number today at 250,000.
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Luis Machado, head of the ILO's unit to combat forced labor agrees the numbers have grown, reports the Los Angeles Times.
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"Over 40,000 workers have been rescued since 1995," he said. "But not one single person in the history of Brazil has been jailed for this crime. These men feel untouchable. They feel they are risking nothing by doing this."

Tens of thousands of Brazilians living in what critics call modern-day slavery, mostly in the Amazon jungle, where ranch owners are the law of the land.
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Promised work, the victims are usually taken to remote, unfamiliar areas, where they face harsh conditions they would never have agreed to and have little chance of escape.
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Some receive little or no pay. Others are told they must work to pay off "debts" for room and board. Some are threatened with violence or abused. Others simply cannot afford the journey home.
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Brutal conditions and a culture of impunity across the 1.5-million-square-mile Amazon region persist in the background of Brazil's stunning economic growth.
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Much of the work that laborers do reflects the illegality that reigns in the jungle. They are put to work cutting down the forest or at illegal cattle farms on protected parts of the Amazon. Others shovel illegally harvested wood into hot pits to make charcoal, often without protective gear.

The government of President Dilma Rousseff has said it is committed to fighting abuse of workers as well as illegal deforestation. Rousseff has been facing pressure from environmental and civil society groups over a new Forest Code bill that would roll back legal protections for the world's largest rain forest.
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Enforcing government rule across the Brazilian Amazon is no easy task. To find out where deforestation is occurring or illegal charcoal camps are operating, workers for nongovernmental organizations fly for hours over the jungle, circling what from a distance look like illegal activities.
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Then a professional navigator tries to pin down the location and later find a way to reach the site.
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The government simply can't be going to every farm to check. The resources don't exist. So rights groups rely on trying to pressure the government to punish proven offenders and educating potential victims about the risks of taking distant jobs they know little about.    (Los Angeles Times)

Russian Muslim honor killings approved

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov   -   His goal is making Chechnya “more Islamic than the Islamists.” 

Murdered Women  -  The bodies of dozens of young Chechen women have been found dumped in woods

• Islamic dress codes are enforced and polygamous marriages are supported

Russia found a good way to end the war with Chechnya's Islamists.  Let them have their way as long as they are loyal to the Russian state.
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Chechnya's government is openly approving of families that kill female relatives who violate their sense of honor, as this Russian republic embraces a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam after decades of religious suppression under Soviet rule.

In the past five years, the bodies of dozens of young Chechen women have been found dumped in woods, abandoned in alleys and left along roads in the capital, Grozny, and neighboring villages reports the Washington Times.

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov publicly announced that the dead women had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives. He went on to describe women as the property of their husbands, and said their main role is to bear children.

“If a woman runs around and if a man runs around with her, both of them should be killed,” said Mr. Kadyrov, who often has stated his goal of making Chechnya “more Islamic than the Islamists.”    

In today’s Chechnya, alcohol is all but banned, Islamic dress codes are enforced and polygamous marriages are supported by the government.   

Some observers say Mr. Kadyrov’s attempt to impose Islamic law violates the Russian Constitution, which guarantees equal rights for women and a separation of church and state. 

(Washington Times)

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov

Chinese Candidate Stripped, Beaten

Your passport to wealth and privilege  -  Membership card
to the Communist Party of China.

Communism in Action
The Elites of the West whore themselves to get into bed with the Communists and could care less about human rights inside the "People's Republic"



Authorities in Beijing detain a woman running in a district election in southern China's Jiangxi province.

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A Jiangxi-based laid-off worker who gained the backing of more than 30 people for her nomination in district elections has been strip-searched and beaten during several weeks' detention in an unofficial detention center, or "black jail," a Hong Kong-based rights group reports Radio Free Asia.

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Liu Ping was detained at the Beijing West Railway Station on March 6 by security personnel from her former employers, the state-owned Xinyu City Steel Group, and forced to return to the eastern province of Jiangxi, the China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) said in an e-mailed statement.

"Her belongings were confiscated, and she was held temporarily in a black jail," CHRD said. "Her captors then forced Liu into a car and drove her back to Jiangxi."

The next day, Liu was blindfolded before being driven to a secret location, the group said.

Chinese candidate Liu Ping was stripped and beaten 
Liu Ping (l) with lawyer Li Zhiyong (r) in Wukan, Guangdong province.
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While human rights are violated in China, the American Beltway Elite eagerly whore themselves to the Chinese Communists to become lobbyists and line their pockets with corrupt money.  The Elite in Congress sells out American workers and business giving the Communists Most Favored Nation Status in the U.S.

"[There,] three women then strip-searched Liu, damaging her clothes so badly that she was left virtually naked and completely disheveled," the statement, adding that the guards had refused Liu food during the daytime.

"When Liu confronted them about her mistreatment, the women beat and kicked her until she fell on the ground," CHRD said.

Liu was detained in "a windowless padded room equipped with surveillance cameras and monitored daily by three women and three men working in two shifts," CHRD said, adding that Liu was tied up and returned home on March 19 after she got sick.


Independent candidate

Before her candidacy for district People's Congress in Xinyu city was rejected, Liu had mustered a strong following among laid-off and retired workers, as well as existing workers who complained of poor conditions in their jobs.

In her declaration to her constituents that accompanied her application for candidacy, Liu promised, if elected, to "do everything in my power to reflect the voice of ordinary people."

"I am not an official, but I am wholeheartedly for the people," she wrote in the document, which has since been circulated online by Chinese netizens. "I have fought on the front line of rights defense work for a very long time, and while my powers are limited, I have never stopped trying!"

The Chinese authorities have warned that there is "no such thing" as an independent candidate, and that anyone hoping to stand for elections this year to the People's Congresses will first have to clear "due legal procedures," the official Xinhua news agency reported.
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(Radio Free Asia)

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We workers are happy to toil for our Communist Masters in China.
Elections?  The Party says elections are a creation of decadent Western Culture.

Hindu Women Raped & Forced to convert to Islam

Where are the Feminists in the West?  You would think they would be up in arms over the rape of women.  But they are totally silent . . . hiding under their beds, quivering in a politically correct fear of speaking out about Islam.

There's little if any attention being given to this growing phenonmen, outside of rightist anti-Jihadist websites here in the U.S. and Western Europe.

As the reporter states:

Pakistani Hindus are seeking refuge in India... admit claims of molestation, kidnappings and rapte. The perpetrators of these crimes against Pakistani Hindu girls, avoid punishment by forcibly converting them, and marrying them against their will... there is a rise in such cases, and these women are increasingly referred too as the stolen brides...

Note the reporter's use of the term "girls," rather than women, implying that many of these rape victims could have been as young as 10 or 11.

Thanks to "The Libertarian Republican"  for the heads up on this story.

Slavery in China

Chinese Communist police have no trouble arresting people for daring to use the internet
or to prevent the formation of labor unions.  But somehow they "look the other way" when
factory owners run slave labor camps.

We like to think humans have evolved, but with the blink of an eye we revert to the Savage


Authorities in central China said they had rescued 30 workers with severe learning difficulties used as slaves in illegal brick factories, in the nation's latest case of labor abuse.

State media on Wednesday reported that some of the victims, who were also regularly beaten, had toiled for more than seven years without pay in Henan province -- already the scene of a huge slavery scandal in 2007.
"These 30 people are mentally disabled, and were taken from their home town and tricked into working," a spokesman for the provincial police, surnamed Zhang, told AFP.

Chinese slavery video

He said authorities freed them on Sunday and were in the process of locating their families. But he added that some of the victims' disabilities were so severe they were not able to identify them.

"In that case, they are being sheltered by the departments that rescued them," he said.

The official China Daily newspaper, quoting a television channel that exposed the scandal, said the victims were mostly abducted and sold to factory bosses for 300 to 500 yuan ($47 to $78).

An undercover TV station sting

The unusually public raids Monday were prompted by a report on Henan provincial television by a journalist who had gone undercover posing as a disabled man at a train station, where he was grabbed by a recruiter and says he was sold to a brick factory.

Some of the slave laborers were reported to be blind. They had been held as long as seven years, working without pay. They had been beaten with belts on the back and the groin, according to the television report.

Eight people were arrested.

The television reporter, Cui Songwang, went undercover in mid-August. He spent three hours making bricks, during which, he said, he was beaten almost constantly. One of the people who beat him with a belt was a teenager who police later said was only 14.

Liu Yuxia, a civil affairs official in Dengfeng, one of the towns where a brick kiln was raided, said it was unclear whether the rescued workers would be able to testify against the factory owners because of their mental impairment.

"The men cannot tell their story well. They can't say how long they were working or for whom. Some of them can't even tell you where they are from," she said.

53,000 migrant workers have been employed in more than
2,000 illegal brick factories in Shanxi alone.

The rescues are getting considerable publicity in Chinese media, but advocates for the disabled are not optimistic about the prospects for longer-lasting reforms.

"These cases happen again and again. The police never follow up; nothing really happens," Zhang Wei, a Beijing lawyer who runs a nonprofit organization helping the disabled, said Wednesday.

In a scandal that shocked the nation in 2007, thousands of people were found to be working without pay in brick factories in Henan and further north in Shanxi province.

They had been subjected to regular beatings and near-starvation, with the alleged collusion of some local officials and police.

Although no official numbers have been reported on how many were enslaved, a parliamentary investigation said some 53,000 migrant workers had been employed in more than 2,000 illegal brick factories in Shanxi alone.

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Slavery in the 21st Century



Former slaves face economic hardship, often with continuing financial dependence on their previous masters.



Mauritania only made slavery illegal in 2007 

By Mohamed Yahya Ould Abdel Wedoud and Jemal Oumar

Mauritania criminalised slavery in 2007, but the effects of the practice continue to linger. Many former slaves are often left with little to no property and no source of income.

The Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA) announced August 4th that a new case of slavery was discovered in the capital. A young girl was being held, even though the country abolished slavery in 1981. The owner was summoned to a police commission, but was released, together with the girl, after 24 hours of detention.

The move prompted IRA head Biram Ould Dah Ould Abeid and scores of his supporters to protest opposite the police commission and to clash with police who responded with tear gas and batons to disperse them. At least 11 people, including the IRA head himself, were injured. Nine activists were later indicted by a Mauritanian court for an unauthorised protest.

"Since my childhood, I used to live with my masters in one of the eastern cities of the country where I was working as a maid," said Mbarke Mint Mahmoud, a 50-year-old mother of five, living in dire poverty in a Nouakchott slum. "However, in the beginning of 2007, the family of my masters abandoned me under the pretext that the state no longer accepted the possession of salves and that they may be punished under the law."

Mint Mahmoud recalled her dark memories from the various poor neighbourhoods in Nouakchott. "I engaged in different manual work so as to win a living, no more and no less. For the time being, I don't own a piece of land where I can live, and I don't have a salary or anything else," she said.

"The future doesn't mean anything to me," she concluded while sitting at the door of an eroded cottage witness to years of deprivation and desperation. "Life is difficult and I expect it to be even more difficult in the days ahead given the high prices and the spread of unemployment."

Social analyst Mohamed Ould Salek said that Mint Mahmoud's case was just one of "hundreds of former Mauritanian slaves who found themselves trapped between the hammer of past slavery and anvil of indifference on the part of state and society".

Mohamed Lemine Ould Mahmoudi was once imprisoned for reporting on right of a young slave to be emancipated. He served more than a month in a Rosso jail, but he continues to cover a practice that he said "is still ongoing in Mauritania".

"Yet, it is certainly not with the same degree of severity as compared to the past before rights groups co-ordinated their efforts to combat it," Ould Mahmoudi added.

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Russia Enacts Law Opposing Abortion

The Russian Parliament passed their first law to begin to restrict abortion. 

Church and State working hand-in-hand


The Right to Life.  The most basic of all human rights.  A right hated by Statists of all types over the centuries.  A right that is working its way back into Russian politics.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev has signed into law the first steps intended to restrict abortion since the collapse of communism, the latest salvo in what is beginning to resemble the fierce divide over abortion in the United States.

The changes require abortion providers to devote 10 percent of any advertising to describing the dangers of abortion to a woman’s health, and they make it illegal to describe abortion as a safe medical procedure reports the New York Times. 

Tighter restrictions on abortion may follow after Parliament considers a separate health bill in the autumn.

The summary on the Web site said the new law “is directed on the whole towards protecting women’s health and makes it mandatory for advertising of medical services on the artificial termination of pregnancy to include warnings on the danger of this procedure for women’s health and the possible harmful consequences, including infertility.”

In Soviet times, abortion was free and unrestricted after the late 1960s. But in recent years, contention over abortion has begun to sound like the debate in the United States.

Mr. Medvedev has made the fight against Russia’s falling birthrate and plunging population, now at just under 143 million, a feature of his presidency, offering incentives like payouts for a third child and land plots to encourage women to give birth.

Official statistics placed the number of abortions at 1.3 million in 2009, a significant drop from the 1990s. Russia’s increasingly vocal anti-abortion activists, some in Parliament, say it is perhaps many times higher, and Mr. Medvedev’s wife, Svetlana Medvedeva, has taken up the cause.

The growing power of the Church

Last Friday, her Foundation for Social and Cultural Initiatives launched a nationwide campaign, “Give Me Life!” which it advertised on its Web site and in brochures and other materials as a “week against abortion.”

One brochure distributed by the foundation warns that “the consequences of a thoughtless step can ruin one’s life” and offered graphic descriptions of what it called the health threat posed by abortion, chiefly in upsetting hormones in a way that could lead to cancer.


Kirill I, Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus'.  The
power and influence of the church has been
growing since the fall of Communism.


The campaign was tied into the “Day of Family, Love and Faithfulness,” a holiday created by Mrs. Medvedeva and the Russian Orthodox Church and centered around Pyotr and Fevronia, a couple who ruled the Murom region northeast of Moscow in the late 12th century and were later declared saints. The president and his wife went to Murom to extol family values and encourage childbirth.

Meanwhile, Valery Draganov, a member of Parliament from United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party, reintroduced a legislative package for consideration in the lower house that would place strict limits on abortion.

Officials of the Russian Orthodox Church had complained that members of Parliament who support a right to abortion had scuttled amendments to a health bill that would have imposed a waiting period. Voting on that bill, which raises a number of other medical issues that have caused an outcry in Russia, has been postponed until autumn.

The Rev. Maksim Obukhov, a Russian Orthodox priest campaigning against abortion since the 1990s, when he was a lone voice, insists that more and more Russians favor restrictions.

Russia’s Orthodox Church has allowed its clergy to enter politics in certain cases, in the latest sign of its growing presence in Russia’s secular society. Endorsed by Kremlin leaders as Russia’s main faith, the Church has grown increasingly powerful since communism fell two decades ago. Its role has drawn criticism from human rights groups who say it undermines Russia’s constitution.

On Thursday, President Dmitry Medvedev backed a decision by the Church to allow clergy to enter politics in certain cases. “The Russian Orthodox church is the largest and the most respected social institution in the modern Russia,” Medvedev told top clergy visiting the Kremlin.


President Dmitri Medvedev with leaders from the Russian Orthodox Church.  They are working with
each other to start restricting abortions.

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