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(JTA) There is an unbalanced focus on Israel by the United Nations Human Rights Council, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told its members. No one in this room can deny that there is an unbalanced focus on one democratic country, Kerry said in an address to the council on Monday, March 2, in Geneva.

It must be said the HRCs obsession with Israel actually risks undermining the credibility of the entire organization, he added, citing the fact that only Israel is a permanent agenda item on the councils schedule.

We will oppose any effort by any group or participant in the U.N. system to arbitrarily and regularly delegitimize or isolate Israel, Kerry told the council. When it comes to human rights no country on earth should be free from scrutiny, but neither should any country be subject to unfair or unfounded bias.

During his speech, Kerry also denounced human rights abuses in Syria, North Korea and Ukraine.

See original here:
Kerry decries Human Rights Councils obsession with Israel

Photo: John Vink / Magnum photos Editors Note: This story is a chapter in The New Global Journalism: Foreign Correspondence in Transition, a report from Columbia Universitys Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

When The Washington Posts new owner, Jeff Bezos, met the newsroom for the first time in September of 2013, he mentioned two recent Post stories that hed found particularly intriguing.

The first was a human-interest feature on the death of a bouncer, the kind of richly descriptive narrative that has been a Post hallmark for decades. But Bezos other favorite was something of a surprise: a 2,800-word piece published in the Posts foreign affairs blog, headlined 9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask.

Conceived and reported in Washington by a Post digital journalist, and written for an online audience, the Syria piece addressed readers in a conversational tone rarely, if ever, used in traditional foreign reporting. If you arent exactly sure why Syria is fighting a civil war, or even where Syria is located, wrote blogger Max Fisher, this is the article for you. No need to feel embarrassed, he continued. Whats happening in Syria is really important, but it can also be confusing and difficult to follow even for those of us glued to it.

Even without the newsroom plug from Bezos, 9 questions was already grabbing attention inside and outside the Post. 9 questions got over three million pageviews on WorldViews, the foreign news blog that is one of the papers main experiments in international digital journalism. Compare that to the potential audience for a top international story in the print newspaper: About 475,000 subscribers receive it, and on a good day a single foreign desk article might get another 100,000 pageviews online.

So, is 9 questions the future of international news: breezy, digital-first, and written by someone in an office thousands of miles from the scene? Perhaps the best answer is, its a piece of the hybrid that is foreign news reporting today at the Post and other mainstream organizations committed to serious international coverage.

In at least two legacy newsrooms, The Washington Post and The New York Times, journalists who dont leave the office are daily contributors to the foreign report, aggregating, curating, and yes, doing original reportingfor WorldViews at the Post, and for The New York Times Open Source column by Robert Mackey.

Their varied labelsblog, columnhint at the uncertainty that hangs over traditional foreign desks in this transitional age. Each of those digital features offers interesting, innovative reporting. Each is part of mainstream medias push to expand international reporting beyond the traditional foreign correspondent model and appeal to more online readers. But whether these new models will prove as durable as the traditional one depends on factors that foreign desks didnt have to worry about in the past: Can they draw a strong, sustainable audience? And can they play a part in resolving the economic crisis that has caused so many mainstream organizations to axe their foreign bureaus?

Shuttered bureaus

Between 1998 and 2011, at least 20 US newspapers and other media outlets eliminated all their foreign bureaus, according to American Journalism Review (ajr). Elsewhere, the number and size of those bureaus of have shrunk dramatically.

More here:
The foreign desk in transition

Local and State News

Johnson is the former director of South Carolina Equality, a post she held from 2010-12. She also is a former two-term member of the Utah House of Representatives, a former vice president of external affairs with Planned Parenthood and a former vice chairwoman on Salt Lake Citys human rights commission, among a host of other positions and accolades.

While there are few who would question Johnsons political and advocacy credentials, there are some specifically City Councilman Cameron Runyan and Common Cause South Carolina Executive Director John Crangle who are questioning exactly what her role is in helping shepherd the citys human rights ordinance along.

Runyan and Crangle claim Johnson is operating as a lobbyist, despite the fact that she is not registered to lobby the city. Johnson straightforwardly denies those claims, noting she is working as a consultant to the city.

The citys Feb. 24 agenda for the human rights ordinance ad hoc committee meeting lists Johnson as a Human Rights Commission Consultant. Free Times obtained a copy of the contract Johnson signed with the City of Columbia. That document lists her as an independent contractor.

According to the contract which is signed by Johnson and City Manager Teresa Wilson Johnson is to be paid not more than $19,500 for her human rights work. That includes $1,500 at the execution of the contract and $3,000 per month from January through June.

Johnsons contract says she is to assist Council, the city manager, the city attorney and the chief of police with establishing and securing passage of a human rights ordinance, and assist in creating the subsequent human rights commission.

The contract also calls for Johnson to help establish procedures to enforce anti-discrimination laws, and to assist Council in identifying and vetting candidates to serve on the commission, among many other duties.

Crangle says, in his mind, Johnsons role with the city would constitute lobbying.

It seems to me that the purpose of her employment is to promote this human rights ordinance, Crangle says. Thats advocacy and thats lobbying activity. She is trying to influence the making of public policy on behalf of a client. Thats definitely what lobbying is.

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Critics Say Human Rights Consultant Is An Unregistered Lobbyist

Here is a fun plotting game (suggested by my colleague David Norwood).

We all know that in the past there were not as many humans on Earth as there are now. Right now we are around 7 billion humans on this planet but just 200 years ago the population was around 1 billion (or less). So, the further back in time you go the fewer humans are on Earth.

Ok, now what about your ancestors? Personally, I have two parents. Both of my parents had parents so that I had 4 grandparents. My grandparents had parents which gives me 8 great-grandparents and so on. The further back in time I go, the more ancestors I have.

Now lets merge these two sets of data. How far back in time do I have to go such that the number of my ancestors is the same as the human population? To answer this, I need two things. First, I need a plot of the Earths population. This isnt too difficult. Just check out this page on Wikipedia regarding World Population. There are plenty of graphs from which you can get population data. I used one of those along with plotlys web digitizer to get the data.

What about a plot of the number of ancestors? If I call myself the zeroth generation and my parents the 1st generation, then I can write the number of humans in a generation as:

Where Ng is the number of humans (just in that generation) and n is the generation number. But what is the time frame for a generation? If my ancestors have children at the age of 20 instead of 30, there will be a different number of ancestors 300 years from now. Of course the actual time between generations varies. For this calculation I will use 25 years for all generations.

Now for the plot.

According to this estimation, in the year 1280 I had 351 million ancestors and there were 351 million humans on Earth. But what does this really mean? Nothing.

When life gives you meaningless problems, make homework. I think that is an old saying. Well, here is some homework.

See original here:
Human Population and My Ancestors

London, UK (PRWEB) March 03, 2015

The human augmentation market is mainly driven by the considerable growth of the augmentation market. The wearable augmentation sector is predicted to outpace the in-built augmentation sector in terms of size in the upcoming years.

The eye-wear sector dominates the North American human augmentation market owing to a big number of new products launches in the region. Furthermore, strong economy of the North American region, high technological advancements as well as the rising demand for advantageous products in the medical application segment are amid the main factors giving impetus to the growth of the human augmentation market in North America. This regional market is anticipated to post the highest CAGR during 2015-2020.

As for the global human augmentation market, it is projected to reach USD 1135 million in 2020, showing a 43.5% CAGR during 2015-2020.

New market research report Human Augmentation Market by Product (In-Built Augmentation and Wearable Augmentation), Application (Medical, Defense, Industrial), & Geography - Global Forecast to 2020 worked out by MarketsandMarkets has been recently published at MarketPublishers.com.

Report Details:

Title: Human Augmentation Market by Product (In-Built Augmentation and Wearable Augmentation), Application (Medical, Defense, Industrial), & Geography - Global Forecast to 2020 Date: February 16, 2015 Pages: 159 Price: US$ 4,650.00 http://marketpublishers.com/report/life_sciences/healthcare/human-augmentation-market-by-product-application-geography.html

This cutting-edge report provides a granular analysis of the global human augmentation market on the basis of products, applications, and geography. It gives a clear picture of the current market scenario as well as offers insights into the historical development of the market. The research report delves deep into the market trends, scrutinizes the competitive landscape of the market and also uncovers important information on the performance of the major market participants. The research study contains a whole set of important statistical data on the production, consumption and foreign trade; investigates the main market growth restraints, drivers, challenges and opportunities. Additionally, the new report offers an extensive future outlook for the worldwide human augmentation market till 2020.

More new market research publications by the publisher can be found at MarketsandMarkets page.

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Human Augmentation Market to Pose 43.5% CAGR Through 2020, States MarketsandMarkets in its New Research Study Now ...

Tourists need to be aware that they are visiting a post-conflict country with a 26-year history of civil war, crimes that remain unaccounted for, and an alarming human rights record," Angela Mattli, from the society, told Telegraph Travel. "They should also be aware of the fact that the military plays a significant role in the tourism sector as well.

Tour operators should not offer hotels or tourist attractions run by the armed forces if it cannot be proven that their ownership is not based on land grabbing or other human rights abuses, the report also suggested.

Passikudah

While recognising that some operators make the effort to improve their compliance with human rights provisions, STP said its report showed that these efforts are not enough to make up for the lack of consultation procedures, for land expropriation, forced resettlement and restricted access to the sea in Sri Lanka.

Tourism Concern, another ethical travel campaign group, said it too investigated tourism development in post-war Sri Lanka in 2011. It now backs the recommendations STP has made for tour operators to exercise due diligence regarding human rights in the country.

Abta, the Association of British Travel Agents, welcomed the report for highlighting what it said were important issues. It described Sri Lanka as a fast growing destination with lots to offer tourists but said that, as with all destinations, it is vital tourism develops in a way that protects environments, promotes long term economic benefit and respects human rights.

We will continue to work with our members to review issues and raise any matters with the Sri Lankan authorities, a spokesman added.

Kuoni, an operator with tours running in Sri Lanka, told Telegraph Travel it is committed to human rights due diligence. We will continue to engage with partners in Sri Lanka to discuss issues and solutions, its spokesman said.

Read the original here:
Sri Lankan tourist development 'the result of human rights abuse'

Editors note: this post originally appeared on the authors blog, Solve for Interesting. This lightly edited version is reprinted here with permission.

In 10 years, every human connected to the Internet will have a timeline. It will contain everything weve done since we started recording, and it will be the primary tool with which we administer our lives. This will fundamentally change how we live, love, work, and play. And well look back at the time before our feed started before Year Zero as a huge, unknowable black hole.

This timeline beginning for newborns at Year Zero will be so intrinsic to life that it will quickly be taken for granted. Those without a timeline will be at a huge disadvantage. Those with a good one will have the tricks of a modern mentalist: perfect recall, suggestions for how to curry favor, ease maintaining friendships and influencing strangers, unthinkably higher Dunbar numbers now, every interaction has a history.

This isnt just about lifelogging health data, like your Fitbit or Jawbone. It isnt about financial data, like Mint. It isnt just your social graph or photo feed. It isnt about commuting data like Waze or Maps. Its about all of these, together, along with the tools and user interfaces and agents to make sense of it.

Every decade or so, something from military or enterprise technology finds its way, bent and twisted, into the mass market. The client-server computer gave us the PC; wide-area networks gave us the consumer web; pagers and cell phones gave us mobile devices. In the next decade, Year Zero will be how big data reaches everyone.

The battle for our digital lifelog is already well underway. You probably buy into Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or a handful of others for your calendar, your email, and your media. Media was a gateway drug to a walled garden: your content is locked in, and the barriers to entry are simply too huge to leave.

The reality is that once inside the walled gardens of GAFA [Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon], consumers will see the walls begin to rise. My music is in the cloud, but soon enough, courtesy of the gateway drug of the quantified self movement, my medical records will be in the cloud, my home security will be managed from the cloud, my banking and my energy needs too.

If a consumer subscribes to one cloud service, then they are very likely to continue with all the extensions of that cloud service platform rather than mix and match. It becomes increasingly inconvenient to remain service agnostic. The dominant players nurture their walled-gardens of creative content and other services tethered to their digital formats and devices. Jeremy Silver, Digital Medieval.

Alistair Crolls Strata + Hadoop World keynote on Year Zero.

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Year Zero: Our life timelines begin

2 March 2015 The United Nations has the mandates and tools it needs to prevent human rights violations, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told delegations gathered in Geneva today for the opening of the current session of the world bodys Human Rights Council, while he warned that the biggest challenge to using these tools is lack of political consensus among Member States.

I appeal to the Human Rights Council to unite behind early, practical steps to support national actors in promoting and protecting human rights. Early action on human rights helps to strengthen national sovereignty, rather than challenge or resist it, Mr. Ban said via video message at the opening of the three-day High-Level Segment of the 47-member bodys 28th session.

The world faces serious violations of human rights, from discrimination and inequality to oppression and violent extremism. Our shared challenge is to do far more to keep these and other abuses from occurring in the first place, added the Secretary-General, who was joined by the Councils President, Joachim Rucker, and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Raad Al Hussein.

The Council also heard statements from the President of The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the Prime Minister of Fiji and dignitaries from 20 States who spoke about their concerns regarding the situation in a number of countries around the world and outlined some of the efforts their countries were undertaking in the promotion and protection of human rights.

Mr. Ban called the protection and realization of human rights intrinsic to the entire agenda of the United Nations and underscored the role of capacity-building, monitoring and reporting including through the work of the Human Rights Up Front Initiative. The conflict in Syria offers just one example where early United Nations efforts to address human rights violations might have averted a human and political catastrophe, he said, emphasizing that Member States must do their part to generate this much-needed shift in the way they work.

Also addressing the Council for the first time since taking his post last year, High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein said the world must be completely principled and cunning in its collective attempt to defang violent extremists.

For us, international humanitarian law and international human rights law cannot be trifled with or circumvented, but must be fully observed, Mr. Zeid stressed, saying how even though the UN Charter was established 70 years ago, with alarming regularity, human rights are disregarded, and violated, sometimes to a shocking degree.

States claim exceptional circumstances, he said. They pick and choose between rights. One Government will thoroughly support womens human rights and those of the LGBT communities, but will balk at any suggestion that those rights be extended to migrants of irregular status. Another State may observe scrupulously the right to education, but will brutally stamp out opposing political views. A third State comprehensively violates the political, civil, economic, social and cultural rights of its people, while vigorously defending the ideals of human rights before its peers.

Some of the evidence may be hidden. But the reality, in far too many countries, of massacres and sexual violence; crushing poverty; the exclusive bestowal of health-care and other vital resources to the wealthy and well-connected; the torture of powerless detainees; the denial of human dignity these things are known, he said, adding: And delegates, they are what truly make up a States reputation; together with the real steps if any taken to prevent abuses and address social inequalities.

The High-Commissioner said he is disturbed deeply by the disregard displayed by several States towards the Council's independent experts and also by the reprisals and smear campaigns that are all too frequently exercised against representatives of civil society.

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Political consensus urgent to protect human rights, Ban tells opening session of UN council

March 2, 2015 - 18:16 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - The President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, is showing signs of a frantic despotism. Journalists, bloggers, lawyers, human rights activists and others who speak out for individual liberty are arbitrarily being swept up in a wave of arrests and detentions, an article on the Washington Post says.

Aliyev, suffering a decline in the oil revenue that has propped up his regime for years, seems to be striking out at anyone who opposes him.

One of Aliyevs favorite tools for silencing people is pretrial detention, the article notes. Azeri law states that it is to be used only in limited cases, and Azerbaijans criminal procedure code put this power in the hands of the courts, not prosecutors, more than a decade ago. In practice, though, the courts have become servants of the prosecution. The European Court for Human Rights noted in a case last year that Azeri courts have frequently endorsed prosecution requests for detention automatically.

Leyla Yunus, a prominent human rights activist, has been in pretrial detention since July 30 on arbitrary and trumped-up charges of treason and tax evasion. She is suffering from a liver condition and diabetes. On Feb 18, an appeals court dismissed her appeal and gave her another five months in pretrial detention, at the end of which she will have been behind bars for nearly a year without trial. Her husband, Arif Yunus, a historian who suffers from cardiovascular disease, was detained on Aug 5. His appeal was dismissed Feb 23, and he, too, was given another five months in pretrial detention.

Meanwhile, the campaign against critical journalists continues. The investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, who described her situation in a letter from prison that ran as a recent Post op-ed, remains behind bars in pretrial detention. A closed-door trial was held Feb 23, three days after her letter appeared, and she was found guilty of criminal libel and fined. The libel charge stemmed from accusations made in 2014 by a man who claimed she defamed him on Facebook, which she denied. In the twisted, Orwellian nature of the Azeri justice system, she was first arrested in December on a charge of inciting a former colleague to attempt suicide and since has been slapped with new charges, including embezzlement, tax evasion, illegal entrepreneurship and abuse of power.

Aliyev seems particularly uncomfortable with the work of the Azerbaijani service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, to which Ismayilova had contributed, the Washington Post says. On the same day as her snap trial, a former chief of the services Baku bureau was stopped at the airport, prevented from boarding a plane and told he was under a travel ban at the request of the prosecutors office. More than 26 journalists and staff of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have been interrogated by Azeri authorities since a Dec 26 raid on the Baku bureau. The news organization is funded by the United States through the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

In a recent magazine advertisement, Aliyev said he wanted to make Azerbaijan one of the most developed and competitive countries in the world. It certainly wont become that if he continues to rule like a despot, the article concludes.

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The Washington Post: Aliyev showing signs of frantic despotism

Moscow If the track record is anything to go by, Russians may never find out who gunned down liberal activist Boris Nemtsov on a bridge beside the Kremlin last Friday, or why.

Mr. Nemtsov, who served as deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin,is by far the highest ranking official to meet such a fate. But he is only the latest of well over a dozen high-profile Russian politicians, human rights activists, and journalists who've been murdered over the last two decades in similarly professional style and almost certainly for political reasons.

And those are just the figures whose deaths made international headlines, such as investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya and human rights worker Natalya Estimirova, and it doesn't begin to illustrate the breadth of political assassinations in post-Soviet Russia. A compendium of journalists from across Russia's 11 time zones who've been slain in the line of work since 1993, prepared by Russian non-governmental groups, runs to well over 300 names.

Not a single one of those major cases, and very few of the lesser-known ones, has ever been fully solved. Even as tens of thousands of Russians gathered in downtown Moscow Sunday to mourn Nemtsov, the few people who keep track of such things were marking the 20th anniversary of the gangland-style murder of Vladislav Listyev, one of Russia's most celebrated political journalists and chief editor of Russia's public TV network. In terse remarks to reporters, spokesman for the Kremlin's Investigative Committee the same body charged with hunting down Nemtsov's killers insisted that Mr. Listyev's case is not closed and "investigative measures are under way to uncover the mastermind of this crime and every accomplice."

Oleg Orlov, chair of Memorial, Russia's largest human rights network, says this dismal record is the main reason most Russians shrug and say they doubt Nemtsov's murderers will ever be found. "Law and order is just on the surface; underneath there is no control. Nemtsov devoted himself to struggling for a law-governed state, but he fell victim to this reality," he says.

The reasons for the failure of Russian justice to get to the bottom of such cases may be complex, but ultimately authorities just don't want to discover the truth, says human rights lawyer Sergei Davidis, a member of the board of Solidarity, an opposition movement.

"Some murders might involve some measure of official complicity. I don't mean to suggest that Putin ordered Nemtsov's death, or anything like that, but the fact that it happened right under the Kremlin wall indicates a high degree of confidence on the part of killers that they wouldn't get caught in that place," he says. "Even if some connection to power isn't present in the crime, investigators will fear that it may be and not want to risk the consequences of uncovering it. In short, that's why we get investigations that consist mainly of foot-dragging and window dressing."

The demonstration effect of Nemtsov's murder is hard to miss. The photos of his dead body, beamed around the world, all showed the iconic spires of Red Square's St. Basil's Cathedral as the backdrop. And he was shot on a newly-minted holiday ordered by Putin to honor Russia's Special Forces. Experts say that bears similar earmarks to the 2006 slaying of Ms. Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in the lobby of her apartment building on Putin's birthday.

"It was clearly a political murder and a provocation. It's just hard to discern who may have done it and what they were trying to provoke," says Nikolai Petrov, a professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. "We should watch what follows from this very carefully, and especially the reactions of the Kremlin."

Some observers are likening it to the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, a highly capable and charming Communist apparatchik who was the chief rival to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The full truth may never be known, but it seems likely that Stalin's secret police covertly orchestrated the killing, which was blamed on the opposition and used as a pretext for a wave of murderous purges that wiped all traces of dissent. There's a chilling hint of that possibility in a weekend statement from the Investigative Committee, noting that one theory they're looking into is that the anti-Kremlin opposition may have "sacrificed" Nemtsov to create a liberal martyr.

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Nemtsov joins long list of those assassinated in post-Soviet Russia