This really is such a great piece. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out. The end of it goes to show how out of touch the average American is with laws around technology. Good reminder to try to stay informed!
What did the Clinton administration know about Rwanda? →
Turns out, quite a lot more than it let on...
This week marks 21 years since the onset of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which more than 500,000 people, mostly members of the Tutsi ethnic minority, were slaughtered. While the Rwandan genocide has become an iconic symbol of the need for international humanitarian intervention, at the time, governments were very slow to react. In the aftermath of the genocide, as the extent of the devastation become clear, governments said they were unaware of what was happening. A growing body of evidence, however, demonstrates what those of us living in Rwanda in the period before the genocide saw clearly — there were ample warnings that violence was approaching. The lack of political will, rather than the lack of information, prevented the world from acting to stop the killing.
Chinese riot police crush grasslands protest over chemical pollution →
Riot police have crushed a three-week-long protest against toxic waste from a chemical refinery complex in China’s Inner Mongolia region, according to local villagers and the government.
It was the latest in a series of demonstrations about pollution on the country’s northern grasslands.
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Tensions have been rising in Inner Mongolia in recent months, as herders protest pollution and land grabs by mining and mineral resources industries, the mainstay of the region’s economy. Herders say that their grasslands and livestock have been poisoned and that little compensation has been paid for losses and land seizures.
Villagers said more than 2,000 riot police officers were deployed over the weekend near Daqintala village in Naiman county in the eastern part of Inner Mongolia, to break up a protest involving about 1,000 locals over pollution originating from the Naiman Chemical Refinery Zone.
Iran’s grass-roots politics and the nuclear deal →
The recently agreed-upon nuclear framework between Iran and the P5+1 world powers is a great example of how grass-roots participation at the level of domestic politics can interact with important changes at the level of international politics. The nuclear breakthrough could not have happened without important developments that led to the election of Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani in June 2013. If this agreement turns in to a comprehensive deal by June 2015, it will have important ramifications for Iranian domestic politics.
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Other users have connected the nuclear deal to the upcoming parliamentary election in February 2016. A prominent reformist activist wrote that the next round of the battle for political change would be the elections for both the parliamentary and the Assembly of Experts. Comments from other reformist activists and politicians also show that they perceive the nuclear breakthrough as a big boost for the victory of reformist and moderate alliance in the 2016 parliamentary election. Reformists appear to expect that this international success could give more leverage to Rouhani’s administration in domestic politics against hardliners and potentially open up space for reformists organizing around elections and collective action without direct political demands within civil society. While it does not seem likely that the Guardian Council will approve prominent reformist figures to run for the election, it is possible that moderate figures in the same vein as Rouhani – or less known reformist politicians – will be able to pass the filter of the Guardian Council.
Tales from the Trenches: I was SWATed →
It's not like we haven't had people prank call the police on others. But 1. the number of false calls is rising, 2. probably because fancy new anonymizing services are making it very hard to find out who's making the calls, and 3. it's far more dangerous than previously, since SWAT has been taking over for more and more traditional police calls.
It's now turned into an intimidation tactic against people's [small-time] political opponents, and police haven't caught on yet. And even those that are aware have no good way of legally or practically dealing with it.
It’s not as simple as homophobic thugs vs. civil rights in Indiana →
These conflicts happen all the time. Sometimes, balancing them is easy. In January, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the state of Arkansas had to allow a Muslim prison inmate to grow a short beard. It weighed the state’s interests in security against the inmate’s First Amendment rights, and the case was a slam dunk. (Then again, it was deemed worthy of review, so maybe not.)
Other times, the balance is difficult. In a powerful concurring opinion in the Elane Photography case, a New Mexico judge confessed that he struggled with his decision. The law was clear: if you open a business, you play by the rules of the market, and that includes anti-discrimination laws. But he also understood the religious convictions of the photographer, and the difficult choice he was forcing her to make.
Indiana’s RFRA, like others, would likely cause that case to come out the other way. And so, both RFRA’s supporters and opponents are right. Indiana’s RFRA, like others, is both a “license to discriminate” and a “protection of religious freedom.”
Is there no way forward, then? Must the two sides continue to talk past one another, each more irate than the other?
The Blood Cries Out →
Gahungu’s experience mirrors other stories familiar to Burundi for decades—stories that are multiplying and worsening as the country copes with a veritable explosion of people. At 10,745 square miles, Burundi is slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Maryland, but it holds nearly twice as many people: about 10 million, according to the U.N. Development Programme, or roughly 40 percent more than a decade ago. The population growth rate is 2.5 percent per year, more than twice the average global pace, and the average Burundian woman has 6.3 children, nearly triple the international fertility rate. Moreover, roughly half a million refugees who fled the country’s 1993-2005 civil war or previous ethnic violence had come back as of late 2014. Another 7,000 are expected to arrive this year.
The vast majority of Burundians rely on subsistence farming, but under the weight of a booming population and in the long-standing absence of coherent policies governing land ownership, many people barely have enough earth to sustain themselves. Steve McDonald, who has worked on a reconciliation project in Burundi with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, estimates that in 1970 the average farm was probably between nine and 12 acres. Today, that number has shrunk to just over one acre. The consequence is remarkable scarcity: In the 2013 Global Hunger Index, Burundi had the severest hunger and malnourishment rates of all 120 countries ranked. “As the land gets chopped into smaller and smaller pieces,” McDonald says, “the pressure intensifies.”