caraobrien:

The drought in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya has been called the “worst humanitarian disaster” by the United Nations. An estimated 10 million people are in need of humanitarian aid. 

If you can spare a few bucks, please donate to the relief effort. 

These are just the organizations that have set up funds for this specific emergency. Other organizations like Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) are working in the region but haven’t (to my knowledge) set up a specific fund for drought relief. 

UN High Commissioner for Refugees

UNICEF

International Rescue Committee

CARE

British Red Cross

Kenya Red Cross

Oxfam International / Oxfam America

World Food Programme

Save the Children

thepoliticalnotebook:

smirza:

Originally published in Foreign Policy

At least 90 people have been killed and scores wounded in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi, over the last four days. The wave of violence was set in motion when a Pashtun-nationalist Awami National Party (ANP) activist was attacked on Tuesday, an…

A must-read backgrounder for the recent violence in Karachi (which, to the shame of Western media, is receiving pathetically little coverage). Great piece.

jonathan-cunningham:

We can also use the Gallup poll to tease out what mix of tax increases and spending cuts the public would like to see in a deal. Assume that the people who told Gallup that they wanted “mostly” cuts would prefer a 3-to-1 ratio of spending reductions to tax increases, and that those who said they wanted mostly tax increases would prefer a 3-to-1 ratio in the opposite direction. (The other choices that Gallup provided in the poll — an equal mix of tax increases and spending cuts or a deal that consisted entirely of one or the other — are straightforward to interpret.)

The average Republican voter, based on this data, wants a mix of 26 percent tax increases to 74 percent spending cuts. The average independent voter prefers a 34-to-66 mix, while the average Democratic voter wants a 46-to-54 mix.

Now consider the positions of the respective parties to the negotiation. One framework that President Obama has offered, which would reduce the debt by a reported $2 trillion, contains a mix of about 17 percent tax increases to 83 percent spending cuts. Another framework, which would aim for twice the debt reduction, has been variously reported as offering a 20-to-80 or 25-to-75 mix.

With the important caveat that the accounting on both the spending and tax sides can get tricky, this seems like an awfully good deal for Republicans. Much to the chagrin of many Democrats, the mix of spending cuts and tax increases that Mr. Obama is offering is quite close to, or perhaps even a little to the right of, what the average Republican voter wants, let alone the average American.

Obama is offering less tax increases and more spending cuts than what Gallup reports as desirable by Republicans, and is still getting rejected. It’s clear at this point that the Republicans are running out the clock and hoping that Obama will receive the blame for the disastrous effects of the US debt ceiling remaining where it is. I can only hope the media and the US population are keen enough on what’s happening to understand who is really at fault.

pantslessprogressive:

“It’s extremely difficult to know what to do as both a journalist and a citizen when confronted with a set of ghastly allegations and legal prosecution like the one that unfolded in Orlando. 

We simply do not know the most relevant facts of the matter… what exactly happened. And yet, there’s this basic and understandable fascination among the public that remains, hungrily demanding more details. And so, inevitably, certain members of the media will happily leap forward with enough outrage and speculation to keep the beast fed.

This isn’t new, of course. There were trials of the century long before there was cable news. But today’s acquittal of Casey Anthony and the strong reactions it’s provoked provide an opportunity to marvel at just how dysfunctional a relationship we have with our own criminal justice system. While a single surprising acquittal makes headlines, the fact is that day after day without cameras or press releases or much interest at all from our political leadership, our country processes a staggering number of people through the courts. Most of them plead out because no one has the resources to actually go to trial. The result is nearly 2.3 million people behind bars and a per-capita incarceration rate of 751 out of every 100,000 Americans, higher than any country in the world - more than six times the rate of China. 

So whether or not justice was done in the case of Casey Anthony, and lord knows I don’t know, it’s almost impossible to conclude that, when you zoom out at our system as a whole, it’s reliably producing justice day in and day out.

Consider just as one example the case of another accused murder, one who attracted one one-millionth of the attention of Ms. Anthony. Cory Maye was convicted of murder and sentenced to death for shooting and killing a police officer in his Mississippi home in December 2001. Having fallen asleep and heard men entering the home, [he] fired off three shots from his handgun before he realized they were police and not intruders. The police had broken in Maye’s home on an erroneous drug tip from an informant. Maye was black, the officer he shot and killed, Ron Jones, Jr., was white. 

The case against Maye was so riddled with errors and his defense so mismanaged that the state appeals court finally ordered a new trial last year. Last week, he accepted a plea of manslaughter and a sentence of time served.

But had it not been for committed attorneys and the dogged journalism of reporter Radley Balko and others, Cory Maye would have been put to death by the state. 

The truly horrifying thought on a day when the country’s attention is so focused on murder and justice is that while a case like Casey Anthony’s can command our national attention, there are almost certainly other Cory Mayes out there who languish out of the spotlight. 

Imagine a world in which Nancy Grace devoted herself to securing justice for them.” - Chris Hayes

scatteredshadows:

Both Edward W. Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in their own milieu, address a number of enormous and intricately connected questions that, for no precise reason that I can think of, consistently occupy a large portion of my thinking, as I make my way through the postcolonial, super-globalized socio-commercial landscape of 21^st-Century American life.  Said’s focus upon Orientalism is especially pertinent to my extremely grudging and disdainful relationship to the transoceanic capitalist structure under which we all must live, and into which our activities as both workers and consumers are continuously and unavoidably channeled; but Spivak’s considerations regarding the reassertion of colonial imperialism via international corporatism is of equal importance, with her despair at the seemingly inescapable futility of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri’s solitary martyrdom being of particular interest to me, as I contemplate the quandary of how, precisely, one is supposed to revolt against the omnipresent and all-encompassing forces of global capitalist exploitation, without either being misinterpreted or ignored. 

In terms of illustrating, illuminating, and exaggerating the importance of the Oriental—specifically the Arab—as the anti-Western, anti-capitalist, “freedom-hating” Other, there is no greater piece of theater available to us than the calamity of September 11, 2001, which arguably sparked the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and thereby paradoxically initiated a new era of Western messianicism in the Near East, beginning with the momentary dispersion of the Taliban and their network of patriarchal oppressions.  This was, as Spivak would have it, a splendid instance of “White men saving brown women from brown men.”  It was also a cathartic release of extravagant aggression against peoples whose modes of being are seemingly without ideological parallel in Western society, and whose symbolic “possession” of the resource without which there would be no Western superpowers as we know them strikes us as incongruous and unfair.  As with all imperialist acts, the post-9/11 Arab occupations represent, among other things, the Occident’s imperative to demonstrate its parasitic dominion over the bodies of its Oriental hosts, with the less probable—and actually more ignoble—secondary hope of influencing their minds as well.  The present-day conditions of commercial Orientalism are such that we are now uninterested in romanticizing the dangerous and barbaric exoticism of the East that we have created, and are instead focused upon domesticating and tranquilizing the noncompliant elements of the East as it “really” is.  In the process, we have helped to create an East that is more dangerous and barbaric than ever.

It may be argued that the modern Islamic extremist is the ultimate—and ultimately voiceless—subaltern.  His message, however well it may be articulated in largely unpublicized and unpublishable (that is, forbidden—suppressed) avenues of discourse, is now taken so much for granted by an oblivious and incredulous West, that it is no longer permitted or assumed to be any message at all—any more than a bee’s “message” in stinging an intruder, or threatening to sting an intruder, is taken into account before its hive is destroyed.  This is to say that we, as a public, continuously and obdurately refuse to grant the minutest seed of legitimacy to the reasoning of those whose fundamental objective is the defiance of Western ideologies.  To we who invented the atomic warhead, the employment of suicide bombers in the midst of civilians is somehow so far outside the realm of justifiability, so entirely Other, that the motivations behind a terrorist’s actions are consciously denied the benefit of examination.  All we are allowed to know of them is that they are Arab, that their religion is Islam, and that they have probably been “brainwashed to hate us.”  What is this but the blustering arrogance of an Imperial thought-machine?  In the enforced “subalternity” of the terrorist, there is a rapacious silence that has rendered mute not only the causalities (and casualties) of terrorism itself, but the circumspective faculty of the system that is its target. 

-DTT

7.5.11 

M.I.A. - Pull Up The People

thepoliticalnotebook:

Picture of the Day. A motorcyclist drives past a burning pile of tires and furniture on the streets of Karachi, Pakistan. July 8, 2011. Karachi, the largest city and the financial hub, has seen a wave of violence in the past four days that has left nearly 90 people dead. Photo: AFP Via.

View more Picture of the Day posts. Submit a photo.

paolomaldini:

Home Demolitions

The Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions estimates that 24,813 houses have been demolished in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza since 1967 (as of July 28, 2010). 4,247 houses, according to the United Nations, were demolished during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

Over 300,000 people are under threat of house demolition in the occupied territories, according to the Broken Homes report.The report states that up to three houses are being demolished every day in the West Bank, and in some cases entire communities are facing up to a blanket demolition order being imposed on them without any warning. Families whose houses are demolished have no time to collect any belongings, fleeing in the clothes they stand up in.

Israel’s house demolitions are not legal under international law. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, Occupying Powers are prohibited from destroying property or employing collective punishment. Article 53 reads: “Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons…is prohibited.” Under this provision the practice of demolishing Palestinian houses is banned, as is the wholesale destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure.

The following are excerpts from B’Tselem’s “Through No Fault of Their Own,”

During the course of the al-Aqsa intifada, which began in September 2000, Israel has implemented a policy of mass demolition of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territories. In that period, Israel has destroyed some 4,170 Palestinian homes.

“The IDF carries out three types of house demolitions. Most are carried out in the framework of what Israel calls ‘clearing operations,’ which are intended to meet what Israel defines as ‘military needs.’ These operations take place primarily in the Gaza Strip: along the Egyptian border, which passes through Rafah and its refugee camps; around settlements and army posts; alongside roads used by settlers and IDF forces; and in the northern part of the Gaza Strip […]

“The second type of demolition are administrative demolitions of houses built without a permit. These demolitions take place in Area C in the West Bank, where Israel retains authority over planning and building even after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, and in East Jerusalem. […]

“The third kind of house demolitions are those intended to punish the relatives and neighbors of Palestinians who carried out or are suspected of involvement in attacks against Israeli civilians or soldiers. These punitive demolitions are intended for the homes in which these suspects lived. However, in many cases, adjacent homes are also destroyed.”

The majority of house demolitions are conducted for ‘Administrative’ reasons. However, permits are almost impossible to obtain by Palestinians living under occupation.