I know that it has been a complaint among many that pictures are circulating with either misleading and inaccurate information, or are are simply the same photos posted over and over.
Perhaps alternative picture sources could be the monthly round-ups from sites like Electronic Intifada and 972 Magazine | Images.
To change things up, perhaps you can look into the Photo Essays page on Jadaliyya.
Knock yourselves out!
The people who lurk the comment section of news articles are the lowest order Internet trolls.
They are the people that you remember exist when your eye accidentally becomes suspended between the text body and the bottom link menu of the page.
Every time this happens I remember why no sane people read these regularly.
"I lost my way and suddenly found myself in front of the municipal building…I panicked when I saw it and my cousins at the other side and my sisters started whispering, “Walk quickly, walk quickly”… Suddenly, I heard a gunshot and felt something very hot in my leg. After a few seconds I felt weak and sat down on the street and put my cousin on the ground while I was screaming, “I was shot come and take me” … When I fell on the ground I saw a pile of sandbags and a gun pointing toward me from a small hole on top of the municipal building…I didn’t see the sniper but I saw the gun."
12-year-old ‘Tamara’, al-Qusayr , Syria
Syria: Government Uses Homs Tactics on Border Town | Human Rights Watch
(via humanrightswatch)
Skipping Spring and Going Straight to Summer
The United States and parts of Canada have come out of winter to find a lingering ridge of high pressure inducing summer-like conditions. The map above shows surface temperature anomalies during March 13-19 compared to averages for those dates over the last 10 years. More than 1,054 locations set new daily high temperatures records and 627 saw new record lows.
Mali soldiers say president toppled in coup
Army mutineers say they have ended Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure’s rule and suspended country’s constitution.
Mutinying Malian soldiers say they have ended the rule of President Amadou Toumani Toure after seizing control of the presidential palace and the state television station in the West African nation.
In a statement read out on Malian state television on Thursday by a spokesman for the soldiers, who described themselves as the National Committee for the Restoration of Democracy and State (CNRDR), the mutineers said they had dissolved institutions, suspended the constitution and imposed a curfew “until further notice”.
“The CNRDR … has decided to assume its responsibilities by putting an end to the incompetent regime of Amadou Toumani Toure,” said Amadou Konare, the spokesman.
Captain Amadou Sanogo, whose title was given as president of the newly formed CNRDR, appeared on state television to urge calm and condemn any pillaging.
Heavy weapons fire had rung out in the capital Bamako early on Thursday and the mutineers, who complain they lack arms and resources to face an uprising by Tuareg fighters in the north of the country, forced the state broadcaster off the air.
Defence minister ‘held’
One of the mutineers told the AFP news agency that soldiers, who said they closed all borders of the country, had seized control of the palace and that Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga, Mali’s foreign minister, was among those being held.
The soldiers also said they had detained loyalist military chiefs at a barracks in the northeastern city of Gao.
A loyalist military chief told AFP that Toure, who was expected to step down after an election scheduled for April 29, was well and in a safe location.
Ayo Johnson, the founder and director of Viewpoint Africa, a citizen journalist hub, told Al Jazeera: “The soldiers need to find a peaceful way to resolve the problems with the government, but it appears that they are not going to back down and this is purely a coup.
“The rest of Africa will be quite upset and troubled, because the Mali issue with the rebels has been going on for nearly 20 years and never been truly resolved.”
France, Mali’s former colonial ruler, reacted by urging that elections be held as soon as possible …
Read More: Al Jazeera
في أمل: stay-human: Airstrikes kill 15 in Gaza10th March, 2012GAZA CITY…
10th March, 2012
GAZA CITY (Ma’an) — Airstrikes continue to rock the Gaza Strip, killing three men on Saturday, raising to 15 the number of Palestinians killed since Israel assassinated a military leader 24 hours earlier.
A further 26…
(Reuters) - Allen Stanford was convicted on Tuesday of running a $7 billion Ponzi scheme, a verdict that caps a riches-to-rags trajectory for the former Texas financier and Caribbean playboy.
It was a vindication for the U.S. government, which closed down Stanford’s financial empire in February 2009 but had failed for years to address signs that the empire was built on air. The Stanford case was the biggest financial fraud since Bernard Madoff’s.
Stanford was found guilty on 13 counts of a 14-count criminal indictment, including fraud, conspiracy and obstructing an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He was found not guilty on one count of wire fraud. The charges carry a possible prison sentence of nearly 20 years.
The verdict came less than a day after a Houston federal jury said it could not reach a verdict, and U.S. District Judge David Hittner instructed jurors to keep deliberating.
Still, the verdict may prove only a moral victory for Stanford’s victims, most of whom have received none of their money back.
Stanford’s personal fortune was once valued at $2.2 billion.
During a six-week trial, prosecutors told how Stanford, 61, repeatedly raided the bank he owned in Antigua, Stanford International Bank, using it as his “personal ATM.”
He bought a castle in Florida for one of his girlfriends and his oldest daughter lived in a million-dollar condominium in Houston. He wore custom-made suits, lived in luxury homes and on a yacht in the Caribbean and bankrolled a $20 million prize for an international cricket tournament.
The government’s star witness, former Stanford aide James Davis, testified that he and Stanford faked documents and made up financial reports to calm investors and fool regulators. They funneled millions of dollars from Stanford International Bank to a secret Swiss bank account that Stanford tapped for his personal use, Davis testified.
Davis, 63, has pleaded guilty to three criminal counts.
Stanford’s lawyers portrayed their client as a visionary who was not involved in his firm’s daily activities. They blamed Davis for any fraud and argued that Stanford’s businesses were viable until the government shut down Stanford Financial Group in Houston in February 2009. Left with no money, Stanford was declared indigent by the court and his defense was paid for with public funds.
(Source: reuters.com)
akio:
WASHINGTON – US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton clarified Wednesday that Washington is committed to preventing Iran from having the capability to make nuclear weapons, not only from their actual construction.
“It’s absolutely clear that the president’s policy is to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons capability,” she told the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, when asked whether the US would allow Iran to become a nuclear threshold state, short of actually building nuclear weapons.
The drawing of a red line with Iran, particularly between having a nuclear weapons capability and having an actual nuclear weapon, is a significant point of discussion between the US and Israel.
Israel would like to see a red line drawn sooner in the nuclear weapons process than many have perceived the US has been willing to do.
Still ambiguous and fuzzy, because at what point ‘nuclear technology R&D capability’ turns into ‘nuclear weapon manufacturing capability’ - is not that clear. But then now Netanyahu stated his idea or demand clearly, he, or Israel thinks that, Iran’s nuclear technology R&D capability needs to be eradicated (=No nuclear material enrichment capacity).
NPT and IAEA surely has giant loop holes and enforcement is never sufficient.
So in a way, there should be an argument and move for doing major overhaul on that too. (That is necessary either Iran acquires nuclear weapon or not, Israel/USA airstrikes will happen or otherwise. But no one is really talking about that loudly enough.)
Anyway, this way of putting it could spark little more fundamental and comprehensive argument.
Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Nobel peace laureate, says the jailed members of Iran’s Human Rights Defenders Centre are being intimidated and pressured into making coerced confessions against their organization.
The Human Rights Defenders Centre of Iran was an NGO established by a group of Iranian lawyers to concentrate on human rights cases in their country. The members of the organization, which is now banned in Iran, have been targeted with fierce persecution over the past three years, especially after the controversial presidential elections of 2009.
Today it was announced that Abdolfattah Soltani, a prominent member of the Human Rights Defenders Centre, has been sentenced to 18 years in prison and a 20-year ban from practising law.
Shirin Ebadi, one of the founders of the centre who is now based outside of Iran, reports: “Abdolfattah Soltani and many other collaborators with the Human Rights Defenders Centre have been pressed one-by-one by the interrogators, in interrogation sessions that have always been private [without the presence of a lawyer], to testify against our organization and myself.”
Ebadi adds that the jailed defenders centre members are being pressured to state that because the centre worked many human rights cases pro bono, then it was actually receiving cash payments from foreign embassies.
The Nobel Peace laureate also reports the interrogators have told his colleagues that if they agree to do a recorded interview saying the Nobel Peace prize was awarded to Ebadi for political reasons to pursue regime change in Iran, they will be allowed to leave the country.
Ebadi also indicates that the jailed lawyers have refused to comply with the wishes of their interrogators.
Abdolfattah Soltani has reportedly told Ebadi that if he refuses to do as his jailors wish, then a fate like that of Nasrin Sotoudeh awaits him.
Sotoudeh, another human rights lawyer linked to the Human Rights Defenders Centre, has been jailed since 2010 and sentenced to six years in prison and a 10-year ban from practicing law.
Nargess Mohammadi, Abdolreza Tajik and Mohammad Seifzadeh have also been persecuted for their connection with the Human Rights Defenders Centre.
(Source: radiozamaneh.com)
