Category Archives: Post Human

Michel du Cille, a Washington Post photojournalist who won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his dramatic images of human struggle and triumph, and who recently chronicled the plight of Ebola patients and the people who cared for them, died Dec. 11 while on assignment for The Post in Liberia. He was 58.

He collapsed after returning from a village in the Salala district of Liberia's Bong County, where he had been working with Post reporter Justin Jouvenal. He was transported over dirt roads to a hospital two hours away but died of an apparent heart attack.

Du Cille won two Pulitzer Prizes for photography with the Miami Herald in the 1980s and joined The Post in 1988. In 2008, he shared his third Pulitzer, with Post reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull, for their investigative series on the treatment of military veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

He became The Post's director of photography in 2007 but returned to the field as a full-time photojournalist in 2012. He was known for his ability to portray humanity even in dire circumstances.

He was married to Post photographer Nikki Kahn and had two children from a previous marriage.

Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron issued the following statement to The Post's staff:

"I am deeply saddened to report that Michel du Cille died Thursday afternoon while in Liberia documenting the tragedy of Ebola.

"Michel collapsed during a strenuous hike on the way back from a village where he and Justin Jouvenal were reporting. He remained unconscious, and was taken to a nearby clinic, where he had difficulty breathing. He was then transported to Phebe hospital, two hours away, where he was declared dead by doctors.

"Michel had returned to Liberia on Tuesday after a four-week break that included showing his photographs at the Addis Foto Fest in Ethiopia.

"We are all heartbroken. We have lost a beloved colleague and one of the world's most accomplished photographers. Our thoughts and prayers are with Michel's wife and fellow Post photographer Nikki Kahn, and his two children.

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Pulitzer-prize winning Washington Post photographer dies of heart attack in Liberia

Michel du Cille, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner whose compassionate pictures captured the human cost of war, natural disasters, disease and broken government programs, died Thursday in Liberia while covering the Ebola epidemic for the Washington Post. He was 58.

Du Cille collapsed while walking back from a village where he had been taking photos. He was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, said his wife, Post photographer Nikki Kahn. The cause appears to have been a heart attack, she said.

The photojournalist had recently returned to Liberia after a four-week break. One of his most powerful pictures was of an 11-year-old girl with tears streaming down her face who lost both parents to the disease ravaging much of West Africa.

"I've had my moments when I had to check my emotions," du Cille said recently in filmed comments he made at a conference in Ethiopia. "But I use those emotions to make sure that I'm telling the story in the right way. To make sure I'm using my sense of respect, my sense of dignity, to show images to the world."

Getty Images staff photographer Chip Somodevilla, who is based in the Washington, D.C., area, said what made du Cille's pictures stand out was his ability to empathize with his subjects.

"The reason his photographs had such an appeal for photographers and non-photographers, alike," Somodevilla said, "was the immediate and apparent compassion for his subjects. He felt it was his job to make sure that when you saw his photos, you knew exactly what the subjects were feeling, whether desperate, sad or joyful."

Du Cille's first Pulitzer came in 1986 at the Miami Herald. It was for news photos taken of devastation in the wake of a volcano eruption in Colombia.

In 1988, while still at the Herald, he won his second Pulitzer for depicting devastation of a different kind the effect that the crack cocaine epidemic had on a low-income housing project.

Du Cille visited the project for weeks without a camera. "I want them to get to know me as a person," he once said, according to an essay on Time magazine's website. "First comes trust, then the work."

His third Pulitzer, shared with a team at the Post in 2008, was for an investigative project that exposed the inadequate care wounded veterans were receiving at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Du Cille, who sometimes sneaked his camera into the facility in a gym bag, showed not only the frustration of long-suffering patients, but also the grimy living conditions they had to endure.

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Michel du Cille dies at 58; photojournalist won Pulitzer three times

Washington, Dec 11:

The US is facing a tough time to defend its human rights record which is being questioned by many countries, including some of its allies, following the release of a damaging report on CIAs detention and interrogation programmes.

Top US government officials including President Obama have acknowledged having made mistakes with lawmakers conceding that some of the interrogation techniques amount to torture.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani yesterday said the CIA interrogation techniques were a violation of international laws while countries like China and Iran have slammed the US for its human rights violation.

Putting a brave front, both the White House and the State Department asserted that it stood by its human rights record and would continue to strongly take up the human rights issues of countries across the globe.

If the US moral authority had been substantially diminished, we would not have had so much success in building a coalition of more than 60 countries, including many Muslim majority countries in the Middle East joining us in the fight against ISIL. So, weve made substantial progress, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said when asked if the US had lost its moral authority.

The president did take these steps in early 2009 to put in place a task force that later in 2009 announced significant reforms to the way that US personnel interrogate and detain individuals that happen to be in the custody of the United States government, he said.

He said the President was very clear in outlawing unequivocal techniques substantially rebuilt US credibility and moral authority around the globe.

We have evidence that this effect is having an impact on our ability to protect American national security interests around the globe, Earnest said.

Noting that the US moral authority is one of the most powerful tools in the countrys arsenal for protecting and advancing American interests around the globe, Earnest said the President believes that there is more that were going to continue to do.

Continued here:
US allies question its human rights record post-CIA report

Americans have long known that, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, the CIA subjected suspected terrorists to inhuman and degrading treatment that amounted to nothing less than torture. A Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday documented that outrageous conduct in stomach-turning detail but also described new offenses to human dignity that border on the pornographic.

The report actually, a 499-page executive summary of a much longer (and still classified) study concludes that not only did the spy agency's program of "enhanced interrogation techniques" fail to turn up any vital, life-saving intelligence, but its extent and effectiveness were repeatedly misrepresented to the White House and Congress, under whose authority it was pursued.

In the inimitable words of former Vice President Dick Cheney, this country traveled to the "dark side" in the months and years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But we didn't know how dark until the release of this report. It's scandalous that Republicans in Congress and many in the national-security bureaucracy tried to bottle up even a portion of the Intelligence Committee's conclusions. In the end, opponents of disclosure resorted to arguing that publication of the report would provoke attacks on America an argument that could be used to justify suppressing the information forever.

It is old news that, armed with dubious legal advice from the Bush Justice Department, the CIA had subjected three detainees to the brutal simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. But the Intelligence Committee found evidence including a "well-worn waterboard" at a dungeon-like interrogation center in Afghanistan that suggests more widespread use of a procedure long condemned as a form of torture.

The committee's summary describes other offenses against human dignity. Detainees were prevented from sleeping for 180 hours as they stood or were placed in painful stress positions, sometimes with their hands shackled above their heads. At least five detainees received painful rectal rehydration or rectal feedings for no medical purpose. The brutality was sometimes psychological: Several detainees were told they would never be allowed to leave the agency's custody alive; others were told that family members would be killed or sexually abused. One detainee apparently died of hypothermia after being chained, naked, to a concrete floor. At least 26 detainees were "wrongfully held," including an "intellectually challenged" man who, the report said, was detained solely as leverage to persuade a relative to provide information.

Such mistreatment would be a violation of the Geneva Convention even if it yielded vital intelligence about terrorist plots past, present and future. But the committee concluded that "the CIA's justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness." For example, the CIA maintained that Abu Zubaydah, who was repeatedly waterboarded, identified Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks after being subjected to "enhanced" techniques. But the committee says that "this information was corroborative of information already in CIA databases."

The committee concludes that the CIA also misled the Department of Justice on which it relied for legal authority about the conditions of detainees' confinement and the debilitating physical effects of the "enhanced interrogation techniques."

All in all, the document released Tuesday amounts to an indictment of the CIA and its political enablers that is no less shocking because many of the events it describes happened during the administration of President George W. Bush and would no longer be permitted. No doubt some of the committee's findings about particular circumstances are open to debate. But defenders of the agency will have a hard time refuting its central conclusions, which are based on analysis of millions of pages of internal cables, emails and other communications, along with interviews conducted by the CIA's inspector general.

The CIA detention and interrogation program was immoral, illegal, out of control and (the committee persuasively argues) unnecessary. President Obama's admission this summer that "we tortured some folks" doesn't begin to convey the appalling violations of human rights and international law cataloged by the Intelligence Committee. The officials who carried out these acts shamed themselves and their country.

In reacting to the release of the report, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said that it "marks a coda to a chapter in our history" and noted that Obama "turned the page on these policies when he took office." But there will be other presidents and other crises that might tempt them to look the other way while human rights are violated in the name of national security. For them, and for us, this report is wrenching but required reading.

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Torture report: Our post-9/11 shame, in stomach-turning detail

A U.S. post office in the Third Ward area will be named after former U.S. Representative Mickey Leland.

The bill to name the Southmore post office building in the 4100 block of Almeda after the civil rights pioneer was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee announced Tuesday.

The building was the site of a 1960 civil rights demonstration that became Houston's first sit-in, she said.

"This post office had a very unique history and story. That is why I am pleased (it) will be named after a civil rights and human rights activist," Jackson Lee said.

Mickey Leland was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979 after earlier serving in the Texas legislature. He died in a 1989 plane crash while on an anti-poverty mission in Ethiopia.

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Post office named for Leland

Think of all the ways you can now experience Barcelona from your couch. You can read about it at length on Wikipedia and peruse snapshots of the Sagrada Familia on Flickr. You can order delivery from the tapas place down the street and enjoy your meal while watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona on demand.

About the only thing you cant do is have the embodied experience of actually walking through the city, deciding which streets to explore, which performer to listen to, which bar to duck into. If a handful of Spaniards has their way, though, youll soon be doing all that from your couch, too.

Omnipresenz is your chance to explore the world with a human avatar. The project, under development by researchers in Spain, works much as youd expect. Someone in a distant city wears a helmet with a GoPro and an internet connection. You, at your computer, use a proprietary interface to dictate where they go and what they do in real time. Their eyes, their ears and, most importantly, their agency become yours.

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A Freaky Idea for Remote-Controlled Sightseeing With Human Avatars

Members of the Gulabi Gang (Pink Gang), a group of women in rural India who strive for social justice and fight for womens rights. Photograph: Manpreet Romana/AFP/Getty Images

Human rights activists often face threats of violence, intimidation and imprisonment while campaigning against injustice. Women campaigning for their rights can face further challenges as they battle against gender stereotypes and opposition to their roles as leaders. To mark Human Rights Day on Wednesday, we hosted a live chat with three human rights defenders who answered your questions on their campaigning work and the challenges they face in uncovering abuses.

Dinara Yunus, Azerbaijan

Yunus is an independent human rights activist who has lived in exile in the Netherlands for the past five years. Her parents, Arif and Leyla Yunus, are prominent human rights defenders who are imprisoned in Azerbaijan. Leyla is founder and director of the Institute for Peace and Democracy. Leyla and Arifs campaigning work included compiling and disseminating a list of political prisoners held in in Azerbaijan. Dinara is working on her parents case.

Christina Tinay Palabay, Philippines

Palabay is the secretary general of Karapatan, a human rights organisation monitoring and documenting violations in the Philippines. She is also the convenor of Tanggol Bayi (Defend Women), an association of female human rights defenders in the country.

Alejandra Ancheita, Mexico

Ancheita is founder and executive director of the Mexico City-based ProDESC (project of economic, cultural and social rights). She is a lawyer and activist focusing on the rights of migrants, workers and indigenous communities. She has dedicated more than 15 years to protecting peoples land and labour rights in the face of increasing infringements from multinational mining and energy companies.

Readers asked about the challenges the campaigners face, particularly from authorities wishing to quash any form of dissent:

Readers also asked what was required for campaigners to affect change:

The rest is here:
Human Rights Day: what do you want to ask campaigners?

Google has spent the past decade-and-a-half perfecting the science of recognizing patterns in the chaos of information on the web. Now its applying that expertise to searching for clues to the genetic causes of autism in the vast sea of data contained in the human genome.

On Tuesday, autism advocacy group Autism Speaks said it was partnering with Google to sequence the genomes of 10,000 people on the autism spectrum along with their family members. Google will host and index the data for qualified researchers to sift as they hunt for variations in DNA that could hint at autisms genetic origins.

We believe that the clues to understanding autism lie in that genome, Rob Ring, Autism Speaks chief science officer, told WIRED. Wed like to leverage the same kind of technology and approach to searching the internet every day to search into the genome for these missing answers.

The project will make use of Google Genomics, a tool launched by the company several months ago with little fanfare on Googles Cloud Platform. As sequencing the human genome becomes ever-faster and cheaperRing says it can be done for about $2,500, compared to nearly $3 billion for the Human Genome Projectthe volume of genetic data generated by researchers has grown astronomically. By allowing researchers to dump that data onto its servers, Google gets to show off and improve the capabilities of its cloud while providing a potentially important service.

David Glazer, director of engineering for Google Genomics and formerly director of engineering for Google Plus, says that instead of searching for keywords, researchers can search for particular regions and sequences along genomes and find sections with common variations. And because a single human genome can run to 100 gigabytes, having the data in a central location makes remote collaboration among researchers easier. Youre a lot more efficient than shipping around station wagons full of hard drives, Glazer says.

Liz Feld, president of Autism Speaks, says she hopes that intense genetic analysis will help researchers tailor more individualized treatments, much as genomic analysis has led to a more refined understanding of different subtypes of cancer. What matters most to us is that this research is going to allow us to uncover and understand the various forms of autism, Feld says.

The autism genomics project is hardly the first Google foray into health and medicine. The company has targeted everything from Parkinsons disease to cancer, though genomics research is especially well suited to Googles technological strengths. In recent years, researchers have come to see biology as ripe for understanding by way of computing as much as chemistry. After all, nature has spent billions of years perfecting DNA as its most efficient way for storing and transferring information.

Autism Speaks has itself been collected genomic data for more than a decade, Ring says. Now he says he believes they have the tools to do something valuable with it: We realized that some of our biggest biology problems were really big data problems.

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Google Opens Its Cloud to Crack the Genetic Code of Autism

DAVAO CITY Thousands of protesters joined the commemoration of the International Human Rights day in different parts of the regionWednesday.

An estimated 8,000 protesters joined the protest actions in Digos (4,000), Kidapawan (3, 000), and Davao City (2,000).

According to Sheena Duazo, spokesperson of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan), human rights violations are rampant under the present administration because of the military operations of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in the communities.

Bayan claimed that in the region alone there are already 92 cases of extra-judicial killings recorded under the present administration.

Despite the intensified protests and resistance of the people, state forces have forcibly occupied civilian homes in rural areas, barangay halls and chapels, Duazo said.

Duazo cited the cases of encampments of schools in the countrysidesincluding the ones in Talaingod, Davao del Norte, where military troop encampment affected 1,500 students.

In an interview with Radyo ni Juan, Officer-in-Charge of the Commission on Human Rights region XI Atty. Irene Montero confirmed that, supposed to be, encampment near the school including passable roads of the civilians, violate the International Humanitarian Law.

She said that encampment should not be allowed in the communities, adding that civilians might get caught in the crossfires.

According to Montero, the CHR is already investigating the recent cases of the human rights violations that resulted from military encampment in the communities.

We have already started the investigation on the recent case of military presence in Talaingod and Kapalong, Davao del Norte, but I cannot disclose the information because the investigation is still going on, she said.

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Protests marks commemoration of Human Rights day in Davao region

DAVAO CITY Thousands of protesters joined the commemoration of the International Human Rights day in different parts of the regionWednesday.

An estimated 8,000 protesters joined the protest actions in Digos (4,000), Kidapawan (3, 000), and Davao City (2,000).

According to Sheena Duazo, spokesperson of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan), human rights violations are rampant under the present administration because of the military operations of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in the communities.

Bayan claimed that in the region alone there are already 92 cases of extra-judicial killings recorded under the present administration.

Despite the intensified protests and resistance of the people, state forces have forcibly occupied civilian homes in rural areas, barangay halls and chapels, Duazo said.

Duazo cited the cases of encampments of schools in the countrysidesincluding the ones in Talaingod, Davao del Norte, where military troop encampment affected 1,500 students.

In an interview with Radyo ni Juan, Officer-in-Charge of the Commission on Human Rights region XI Atty. Irene Montero confirmed that, supposed to be, encampment near the school including passable roads of the civilians, violate the International Humanitarian Law.

She said that encampment should not be allowed in the communities, adding that civilians might get caught in the crossfires.

According to Montero, the CHR is already investigating the recent cases of the human rights violations that resulted from military encampment in the communities.

We have already started the investigation on the recent case of military presence in Talaingod and Kapalong, Davao del Norte, but I cannot disclose the information because the investigation is still going on, she said.

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Protests mark commemoration of Human Rights day in Davao region