Human Rights

Australia’s top medical body has condemned the mandatory detention of boatpeople as “inherently harmful” to their physical and mental health, after documents revealed a surge in self-harm among detainees.

At least 50,000 Brazilian rural workers called for increased social justice, especially for women, from President Dilma Rousseff’s government as they marched through Brasilia’s streets on Wednesday. “Brazil is a very socially unequal country and when it comes to women, that inequality is even bigger,” said Carmen Foro, who coordinated this year’s annual protest march.

Plans for a law condoning same-sex marriage are being considered by the ruling left wing coalition party, Frente Amplio, in Uruguay. A project created by Uruguay’s first transsexual lawyer, Michelle Suárez, will be unveiled shortly to the Constitution Commission and the Chamber of Deputies.

While politicians in rich countries have been rescuing powerful “market lord”–private corporations and banks that have unleashed the global financial crisis or strongly contributed to it– for the sake of receiving their ‘electoral blessing’, the prices of grain and milk in the drought-hit Horn of Africa have risen to record highs.

Forty years after the Stonewall riots, when a group of homosexuals stood up to police to fight a raid on a New York City bar, a milestone for the gay movement, that day Honduras saw the Americas’ first coup d’état of the 21st century. In the aftermath, a slew of human rights violations occurred, many of them violence against Honduras’ gay community.

According to a report by the British newspaper The Guardian new documents it has seen confirm what the ex Ambassador to Uzbekistan has been saying all along. That the UK Foreign Office knew torture was being used in the interrogation of terrorism suspects and in spite of its illegality and unreliability it accepted information thus obtained.

Yesterday’s discovery of the body of Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz, a crime reporter and columnist for the regional daily Notiver in the east-coast port city of Veracruz, adds her name to the long list of journalists who have been murdered or have disappeared in Mexico. A total of 77 have been killed since 2000 and 23 have gone missing since 2003.

Heavy clashes have erupted in the Somali capital of Mogadishu after African Union troops launched operations against the militant group, al-Shabab. The AU says it is trying to protect famine relief efforts from al-Shabab, which has reportedly tried to block the delivery of aid after initially denying that a famine is taking place. At least 6 people were killed in the violence

Mr. Pierre Galand, the international coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, confirmed at a Cape Town press conference on Thursday that the Tribunal´s third session will be held November 5-6 in Cape Town, South Africa. The Russell Tribunal on Palestine is an international people’s tribunal to promote peace and justice in Palestine and the Middle East.

By Aljosa Milenkovic

As Greece faces the worst economic woes in its history, Greek journalists struggle with their own fears and their failures in covering the crisis.

One of the most popular editorial coping mechanisms is to blame the problem on others, in this case the European Union. Many in Greece consider the EU to be part of the problem rather than the solution.