AFP – “Bahraini authorities should immediately investigate… allegations of torture and guarantee the physical and psychological well-being of the four men,” Joe Stork, the deputy Middle East director at HRW, said in the late-Wednesday statement. Abduljalil al-Singace, a leading figure in the mainly-Shiite opposition association Haq, told Bahrain’s attorney general in late August that he had been tortured by security forces while in detention over the previous 15 days, HRW said. Read Article
Associated Press – An anti-abortion group plans to air radio ads in three congressional races calling for the defeat of Democratic incumbents, among the first ads to capitalize on a Supreme Court ruling this year that freed corporations to directly influence elections. The group, AUL Action, is targeting Democratic Reps. John Boccieri of Ohio, Christopher Carney of Pennsylvania and Baron Hill of Indiana. AUL Action is the legislative arm of the nonprofit Americans United for Life. Ad spending is on a record pace as outside groups raise more money from corporations, individuals and unions. Read Article
Guardian – Constant ID checks in supermarkets and off-licences are “infantilising” young adults and confusing shoppers about legal age limits, a report by a civil liberties group claims today. The survey by the Manifesto Club suggests that cashiers’ over-zealous questioning of customers in their 20s is “penalising thousands of innocent” people and forcing them to carry their passports all the time. Read Article
ABC – Indigenous academic Mick Dodson has delivered a warning to the WA Premier, describing compulsory acquisition of land for the Kimberley gas hub as theft and an invasion. The Premier Colin Barnett is expected to start proceedings to acquire the land at James Price Point through the courts this week. He says negotiations between traditional owners and Woodside have dragged on too long, cost too much, and he has run out of patience. Professor Dodson, who’s a Yawuru man from Broome, says it is an appalling path to take. Read article
Epoch Times – A Qantas employee, removed from her job after being deported from China for practising Falun Gong, was likely targeted by Chinese spies, says a representative of Falun Gong in Australia. Mr. John Deller, spokesman for the New South Wales Falun Dafa Association, said that Falun Gong practitioner Sheridan Genrich, a Qantas flight attendant, was stopped and interrogated before she was searched during a stopover in Beijing. Read Article
Associated Press – Human Rights Watch has urged Bahraini authorities to immediately look into allegations of torture made by four Shiite activists in detention since mid-August. In a statement Wednesday, the group said Abdul-Jalil al-Singace, one of the detainees, told prosecutors that his captors beat him on his fingers with a hard instrument, slapped him around, and pulled and twisted his nipples and ears with tongs. Read Article
Australian – China, which executes more people each year than any other country, said it is considering dropping capital punishment for economic crimes. A draft amendment to the country’s criminal code proposes cutting 13 “economy-related, non-violent offenses” from the list of 68 crimes punishable by the death penalty, the official Xinhua news agency reported. International rights groups have criticized China for its heavy use of the death penalty, saying it is excessive. It is not known when the draft will become law. Read Article
AAP – A report into a West Australian prison has found its conditions are “degrading” with overcrowding forcing up to three inmates to share cells designed for one. Some inmates even have to sleep on the floor on mattresses that become so soaked in overnight condensation they wake up wet, the inspector of WA custodial services says. The report into the inspection of Greenough Regional Prison, near Geraldton on the WA mid coast, was released on Tuesday. Read Article
Guardian – Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning, was told on Saturday that she was to be hanged at dawn on Sunday, but the sentence was not carried out, it emerged tonight. Mohammadi Ashtiani wrote her will and embraced her cellmates in Tabriz prison just before the call to morning prayer, when she expected to be led to the gallows, her son Sajad told the Guardian. “Pressure from the international community has so far stopped them from carrying out the sentence but they’re killing her every day by any means possible,” he said. Read Article
Bloomberg – The American Civil Liberties Union sued the U.S. government over an alleged policy of killing American citizens who are suspected of terrorism. The lawsuit, filed today in federal court in Washington, argued that such targeted assassinations by the government are unconstitutional. “A program that authorizes killing U.S. citizens, without judicial oversight, due process or disclosed standards is unconstitutional, unlawful and un-American,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said in a statement announcing the filing of the case against U.S. President Barack Obama, the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. Read Article
Epoch Times – Illegal organ harvesting has become worse under reforms put in place by the Chinese leadership to stop it, says a Canadian human rights lawyer. David Matas is in Australia to present a paper on the issue at a United Nations conference for non-government organisations (NGOs) involved with health in developing countries. Read Article
Washington Post – The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit Monday challenging the U.S. government’s authority to target and kill U.S. citizens outside of war zones when they are suspected of involvement in terrorism. The civil liberties groups sued in U.S. District Court in Washington after being retained by the father of Anwar al-Aulaqi, a radical U.S.-born cleric who is in hiding in Yemen. The CIA placed Aulaqi on its list of suspected terrorists it is authorized to kill earlier this year; the cleric had been on a separate list of individuals targeted by the Joint Special Operations Command. Read Article
Detroit News – An autopsy being conducted today is expected to shed more light on the injuries a Livonia man suffered after being Tasered by a city police officer. Michael Sheldon Ford, 50, was jolted with the stun gun early Aug. 14 after police said he refused to lie on the ground as ordered. According to police, Ford was waving “what appeared to be two knives, one in each hand,” at an officer who responded to the Purlingbrook Apartments on Eight Mile. Read Article
Reuters – As U.S. combat operations come to a close on Tuesday 7-1/2 years after the invasion, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis like Abboud, who fled mixed-sect neighborhoods at a time when bodies were piling up in the streets overnight, are living in squalor. Many Iraqis fear the reduction in U.S. troops and their full withdrawal next year will re-ignite sectarian bloodshed. The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, says the Iraq war produced the worst humanitarian crisis in the Middle East since 1948, when half the Arab population of Palestine fled their homes after the creation of Israel. According to the UNHCR, 1.5 million people are displaced inside Iraq, of which 500,000 are squatting in camps or public buildings. In Baghdad, 200,000 people live in 120 camps. There are also hundreds of thousands of Iraqis abroad, mainly in neighboring Jordan and Syria. Read Article
Daily Mail – Family rights campaigners have called for a change in the law after it was revealed that girls as young as 12 can be given the cervical cancer vaccine without their parents’ consent. Doctors and nurses have been told they are under no legal obligation to seek the permission of the parent or guardian. Read article
AFP – A panel of UN human rights experts has strongly condemned the execution of four men over a February 2009 attack on the presidential palace in Equatorial Guinea’s capital Malabo. In a statement seen Saturday on a UN website, the UN working group on mercenaries said a “lack of transparency” during their trial pointed to “severe shortcomings” in the application of human rights in the west African nation. Amnesty International has already decried the swift execution of Jose Abeso Nsue, Manuel Ndong Anseme, Alipio Ndong Asumu and Jacinto Micha Obiang on August 21 by a military court in Malabo. Read Article
Epoch Times – The Falun Dafa Information Center released a statement on Aug. 27 reporting that the Chinese police abducted a woman who died eight days later while in police custody. Yan Pingjun of Heibei, China is a 45-year-old Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) practitioner. According to the center, “Falun Gong is a traditional-style Buddhist “qigong” practice, with roots in the Chinese heritage of cultivating the mind/body for health and spiritual growth.” It is now practiced in over 100 countries. Read Article
Courthouse News – The Vietnam Veterans of America asked a federal judge to impose sanctions on the Central Intelligence Agency, for failing to produce documents on the CIA’s testing of hundreds of kinds of drugs – including sarin and phosgene nerve gas and LSD – on thousands of soldiers. The Vietnam Veterans of America sued the CIA in January 2009, claiming the agency had experimented on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick, Md., testing the effects of mind-controlling drugs. Read Article
Daily Tech – Federal agents can now enter your property without warrant and track you in nine western states Most would consider the Constitution is one of the finest achievements by the U.S. people and has viewed as a paradigm internationally. However, in an age of technological revolution, members of U.S. local, state, and national level — on both sides of the aisle — are increasingly viewing some of the Constitution’s guaranteed rights as inappropriate or at least subject to review. Read Article
Wired – Inmates of the Pitchess Detention Center, watch your step. If you get out of line, you may get blasted with an invisible heat ray. The jail’s energy weapon is a small-scale version of the Active Denial System, the experimental crowd control device that the U.S. military brought to Afghanistan — and then quickly shipped back home, after questions mounted about the wisdom of blasting locals with a beam that momentarily puts them in agony. The pain weapon seemed at odds with the military’s efforts to appear more humane and measured in the eyes of the Afghan populace. Read Article
Guardian – US supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor has said the court is likely to have to rule on the issue of balancing national security and freedom of speech due to WikiLeaks posting a cache of US military records about the Afghan war. Sotomayor said the incident, which has been condemned by the Pentagon, was likely to provoke legislation in Congress that would require judicial scrutiny. Read Article
Associated Press – The government reported Thursday that 4.4 percent of inmates in prison and 3.1 percent of inmates in jail report being victimized sexually by another inmate or staff member. Those percentages translate to the sexual victimization of 88,500 inmates behind bars nationwide in the previous 12 months, according to a study by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2008-2009. Read Article
Time – Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements. That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant. (See a TIME photoessay on Cannabis Culture.) It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. Read Article
Forbes – As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins to simmer, it’s worth noting that courthouses and airport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets. Read Article
PressTV – Children of third world countries and nations in transition have become ‘laboratory rats’ for the US’ clinical tests for new drugs, an Indian newspaper says. Under US’ 1997 legislation called the Pediatric Exclusivity Provision, intended to speed up development of new drugs for American kids, the trials were carried out in countries such as Uganda and India, The Times of India reported. Read article
