Tag: Red Cross

I spoke to Jonathan Chartian this morning. Released from prison Dec. 14, 2016, he is confined to his home when not at work, his job suspended since Hurricane Harvey. He is really concerned about the excessive show of police and military presence, which is not protecting the rights of citizens, rather complicating an already volatile situation between Black and Brown people and law enforcement.

Using a practice which has been condemned by the American Medical Association and the Red Cross as a form of torture and “never ethically acceptable,” Wisconsin Department of Corrections personnel have been forcing a feeding tube through the nose and down the throat of their restrained and struggling captives three times a day since last weekend.

When Bill and Hillary Clinton married in 1975, a friend gave them a trip to Haiti for their honeymoon. The Washington Post reported: “Since that honeymoon vacation, the Caribbean island nation has held a life-long allure for the couple, a place they found at once desperate and enchanting, pulling at their emotions throughout his presidency and in her maiden year as secretary of state.”

On May 29, 2015, on the Golden Gate Bridge side of Treasure Island, smelly brown chocolate ooze began to gush from the Lundgren family’s 1201-B Bayside Drive faucets. The other side of the island had just trembled. Between the Job Corps grounds and the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Lennar Corp. engineers had penetrated 50 feet of soil with huge vibrating bores.

For decades, prisoners in California have protested the torturous conditions they are subjected to. Now a nurse has come forward who worked in a California prison and can speak to personally witnessing some of these horrors perpetrated by some of his colleagues at the California Men’s Colony State Prison in San Luis Obispo. Paul Spector was fired from his job for speaking out. Check him out in his own words ...

When a mother and her autistic son are evicted, where are they supposed to turn? For Bessie Taylor of Monterey County, every option has come up short. Now, she’s worried about what comes next. Bessie and Devonte Taylor are staying in a motel, but come Friday, the money for that will run out. POOR Magazine is currently seeking legal support for the family to overturn the illegal eviction from public housing as well as collecting emergency donations for Bessie and Devonte to keep them temporarily housed in the motel so they are not on the street.

On Jan. 9, MASSIVE demonstrations throughout Haiti supported former President Aristide after he was summoned to court on frivolous charges seen as political persecution. People say that putting Aristide on trial is the same as putting the Haitian masses on trial and that the charges are meant to divert attention from the third earthquake anniversary and the theft of billions in aid. Speak out against the Red Cross for building a luxury hotel with aid funds. Rally Friday, Jan. 11, 4:30-5:30 p.m., outside Red Cross headquarters, 3901 Broadway, near MacArthur BART, Oakland.

Tens of thousands of people have been demonstrating in Haiti for months. Three years after the earthquake, despite billions donated by a generous public, hundreds of thousands of people are still struggling to survive in tent cities, surrounded by rubble. They are still without clean water or food security or income, still fighting the cholera imported by U.N. troops.

The situation in public housing projects in Coney Island, Brooklyn remains a “humanitarian crisis” in which the government and the Red Cross have been nearly completely absent, according to Eric Moed, a volunteer aid worker with Occupy Sandy. The projects in Coney Island remain without power and often without water and necessities in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Ask anyone living in Cobble Hill or Carroll Gardens or Park Slope earlier this week, and they would tell you that they have power, hot water and wi-fi. In fact, most of the $1 million-plus townhouses and local businesses in Brooklyn’s wealthier neighborhoods never lost any basic necessities, even during the worst of the storm. But the Gowanus Houses, a low-income public housing complex owned and operated by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), which falls almost at the intersection of those three neighborhoods, is an exception.

More than 70 percent of Haitians responding to a recent poll said they wanted MINUSTAH to leave within a year. The U.N. can use the money currently wasted on this military force to rid the country of cholera. Then, at least, they will have cleaned up one of their biggest crimes in the country.

Over 1,600 Palestinian prisoners are currently engaged in a steadfast and open-ended hunger strike that launched on April 17, 2012, Palestinian Prisoners’ Day. They are demanding an end to solitary confinement; access to family visits for all prisoners; and access to education and media. And they are demanding international solidarity.

Broken and collapsed buildings remain in every neighborhood. Men pull oxcarts by hand through the street. Women carry 5-gallon plastic jugs of water on their heads, dipped from manhole covers in the street. Women carry 5-gallon plastic jugs of water on their heads, dipped from manhole covers in the street.

Ethiopian troops are in the oil rich, contested Sudanese Abyei region in accordance with a new U.N. Security Council resolution invoking sovereign nations’ “responsibility to protect” vulnerable populations from genocide and mass atrocities if their own governments aren’t protecting them. But what about Ethiopia’s own genocide in the Ogaden Basin that the West is funding?

Leading members of Haiti’s bourgeoisie tried to turn the Haitian police force into their own private army, according to a secret U.S. Embassy cable provided to Haïti Liberté by the media organization WikiLeaks.

While thousands of mostly Black migrant workers fleeing the rebels' anti-Black racism are trapped in refugee camps on the Tunisian border, aid workers lounge in tourist hotels, Tripoli endures nightly bombings and the DIGNITY Delegation visits the Qaddafis' home hit on April 30 by bunker buster bombs fired from a U.S. warplane. Their son Seif and three small grandchildren were killed in the airstrike aimed at Col. Qaddafi, who was in the yard tending to animals in the children's petting zoo.

It’s been 25 years since the film version of Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” opened to much controversy. Despite the controversy, the story is one that is still read, watched and celebrated in many forms. The San Jose production of the musical is fantastic! This is the final weekend.

The threat of the recent cholera outbreak in Haiti has been intensified by Hurricane Tomas. The already bad sanitary conditions combined with the flooding from the hurricane is expected to cause the infection rate to jump.

The cholera epidemic has killed 250 Haitians and over 3,000 more are infected and may die. This cholera is caused by drinking dirty, toxic water. According to Haiti’s health minister, cholera “can kill in three hours because once the diarrhea starts it doesn’t stop.”

“If you want to help Haiti, let’s start by telling the truth, OK? The truth is that on April 7, 2003, President Aristide, a democratically elected president on the side of the poor, called together a Restitution Commission which determined that France owed Haiti $21 billion. And within weeks, France and the United States told Aristide it was time for him to go. Step aside, step down, resign or be killed."