Online Media and Technology to the Service of Refugees

Refugees: Online Media and Technology to the Service of Refugees
Video
Posted 29 April 2012 5:29 GMT

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/04/29/refugees-online-media-and-technology-to-the-service-of-refugees/

Two different organizations are focusing on the benefits and advantages of online media and technology to aid refugees and improve their lives. The first, Refugees United, uses online databases that can be accessed through mobile platforms to reunite refugees who have lost track of family members and the next, HKRefugeeInfoChannel provides legal and welfare information to refugees in Hong Kong through YouTube videos.

Refugees United started off as a pilot in Northern Uganda that is now spreading to other African countries and other areas of the world where natural disasters, political unrest and violence have caused massed evacuations and people to get separated from their kin and loved ones. Through an anonymous database, refugees can create a profile where they can share details about their lives that will be recognizable by kin who go online through a computer or using cellphones.

In Lost and Found, four refugees tell their stories of escape and loss, and what it is like for them to go on with their lives not knowing about their loved ones, not even if they are alive or dead. Although different NGOs have done efforts in the past to reunite refugee families, handwritten papers and photographs aren't easily shared by multiple organizations and across international borders. With the ability to have an online repository that different organizations and individuals can join and search through, the possibility to unite families is increased.

Alone: India's Farmer Widows

Alone: India's Farmer Widows
India's ongoing water crisis has driven 200,000 farmers to suicide. As water dwindles, that number grows, and farmer widows are left to pick up the pieces. —Photos by Michael Francis McElroy/Text by Noella May Hebert

http://www.motherjones.com/slideshows/2011/08/india-water-crisis-suicide-women/manuala-betwa

Over the past decade, India has been gripped by a devastating water crisis. Farmers make up an estimated 70 percent of the country's population, and for them the consequences of the drought have been dire: Overwhelmed by chronic lack of water, failed crops, and growing debts, more than 200,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1997.

Their families often find them either hung or poisoned by pesticides they've chosen to ingest. The widows left behind struggle to support their children, working as landless laborers for as low as 100 rupees ($2) a day and battling creditors that come to collect money they claim to have lent their husbands. This slideshow features portraits of widows from Maharashtra, one of the three most suicide-ridden states in the nation. They represent only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands left behind.

Why Drones Have Become The Weapon Of Choice

Why Drones Have Become The Weapon Of Choice
By Danny Schechter

Source: Paltalk.comSaturday, April 28, 2012

http://www.zcommunications.org/why-drones-have-become-the-weapon-of-choice-by-danny-schechter

Self-delete, dupe.

The Self-Made Myth: Debunking Conservatives' Favorite -- And Most Dangerous -- Fiction

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101626128

Armchair Warriors: Why Are Conservatives the Biggest Warmongers?

Oxford University Press / By Corey Robin

Armchair Warriors: Why Are Conservatives the Biggest Warmongers?

Conservatives in government have fetishized violence. Why?

April 23, 2012 |

http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/155112/armchair_warriors%3A_why_are_conservatives_the_biggest_warmongers_/

The following is Part 2 of an excerpt from Corey Robin's book "The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin." You can find Part 1 here. http://coreyrobin.com/2012/04/22/protocols-of-machismo-on-the-fetish-of-national-security-part-i/

This is a long but very interesting article. IMHO.

European, US Austerity Drive is Suicidal: Nobel Economist Stiglitz

Published on Friday, April 27, 2012 by Common Dreams

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/04/27-1

European, US Austerity Drive is Suicidal: Nobel Economist Stiglitz

'The Occupy movement has been very successful in bringing those ideas to the forefront of political discussion.'
- Common Dreams staff

Democracy Now! airs an exclusive excerpt of "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre,"

Measuring Wars by a Loss of Principles

Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling

http://article.wn.com/view/WNATC098D62D5DFC32E3BD36CEECDCA1CBD3/

Literally over night in May of 1970, President Richard M. Nixon's ill-planned and ill-fated invasion of Cambodia revived the dwindling antiwar movement to vigorous life. Whether it was his verbal barrages of "Peace with Honor" or his "Vietnamization" euphemism that lulled pro-life protesters to sleep, when President Nixon announced he was ordering a military "incursion" into Cambodia to "clean out" bases the enemy had been using for "its increased military aggression," a crescendo of anti-war demonstrations across America occurred. Anger at the draft, false optimism about the endless military occupation in Vietnam, and combat footage of atrocities in the nightly news all had an impact on antiwar protesters. But nothing infuriated them more than escalating the war with Cambodia.

Hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters marched on, and then occupied, Washington DC. Millions participated in small rallies and pro-life marches on college campuses nationwide. Military rage and insanity was being met by a more peaceful and more sane and principled movement. Some protesters were willing to even sacrifice their own lives to assure the U.S.-Vietnam/Cambodia War was brought to an end and that senseless killings, killings that had cost the lives of four million Vietnamese and fifty-thousand U.S. troops, would not happen in Cambodia. On May 4, the National Guard opened fire on antiwar protesters at Kent State killing four students. Ten days later at Jackson State, police fired into a women's dormitory with automatic weapons killing two black students.

But since the U.S.-Vietnam War, most military engagements and occupations have been measured only by the loss of American soldiers. Principles, like increasing technological savagery, psychological distress and political repression, or the disregard for murdering thousands of non-Americans, or even one, has been ignored. The preemptive wars against Iraq and Afghanistan killed hundreds of thousands of people. Millions have become refugees. Prior to these military interventions and even though very few American troops died, sanctions against Iraq killed over 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children and the elderly. Past incursions into Central America, the Caribbean and Africa have also created mass carnage, maiming and killing thousands of people while causing hardship for millions.

Instead of measuring America's wars by how many U.S. soldiers have been killed, why not base them on universal principles that have somehow been lost. If a principle is an important rule, law and guideline which other rules or judgments are derived, why not measure wars on how many non-Americans are killed or the utter disregard for national sovereignty? Since principles denote moral decisions that are required for civilizations to thrive, even survive, should not individuals-especially in wartime-guard against the loss of democratic rights and life? And if the character of a nation is founded on principles and moral beliefs too, instead of self-interest or the tyranny of the market why not: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" and "Do no harm" values?(1)

Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - The Hospital Of Horrors

By Robert Fisk

Source: The IndependentFriday, April 27, 2012

http://www.zcommunications.org/the-children-of-fallujah-the-hospital-of-horrors-by-robert-fisk

The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi's administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a right arm, no left leg, no genitalia.

"We see this all the time now," Al-Hadidi says, and a female doctor walks into the room and glances at the screen. She has delivered some of these still-born children. "I've never seen anything as bad as this in all my service," she says quietly. Al-Hadidi takes phone calls, greets visitors to his office, offers tea and biscuits to us while this ghastly picture show unfolds on the screen. I asked to see these photographs, to ensure that the stillborn children, the deformities, were real. There's always a reader or a viewer who will mutter the word "propaganda" under their breath.

But the photographs are a damning, ghastly reward for such doubts. January 7, 2010: a baby with faded, yellow skin and misshapen arms. April 26, 2010: a grey mass on the side of the baby's head. A doctor beside me speaks of "Tetralogy of Fallot", a transposition of the great blood vessels. May 3, 2010: a frog-like creature in which – the Fallujah doctor who came into the room says this – "all the abdominal organs are trying to get outside the body."

This is too much. These photographs are too awful, the pain and emotion of them – for the poor parents, at least – impossible to contemplate. They simply cannot be published.

Afghan Screams Aren’t Heard

Afghan Screams Aren’t Heard

By Kathy Kelly and Hakim

Saturday, April 21, 2012

http://www.zcommunications.org/afghan-screams-aren-t-heard-by-kathy-kelly