Canada gets human rights failing grade from Amnesty International

By: Olivia Ward, Foreign Affairs Reporter

Excerpt;

…. An Amnesty report released Wednesday says that committees on racial discrimination, prevention of torture and children’s rights found “a range” of “ongoing and serious human rights challenges,” especially for indigenous peoples.

“By every measure, be it respect for treaty and land rights, levels of poverty, average life spans, violence against women and girls, dramatically disproportionate levels of arrest and incarceration or access to government services such as housing, health care, education, water and child protection, indigenous peoples across Canada continue to face a grave human rights crisis,” it said. ….

Read more » The Toronto Star

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1304353–canada-gets-human-rights-failing-grade-from-amnesty-international

Pregnant Woman Miscarries After Being Sprayed With Pepper Spray

By Matt Stopera

This is horrible. A pregnant protester named Jennifer Fox has miscarried after being pepper sprayed and hit in the stomach by Seattle police officers during a peaceful protest last week. ….

“I was standing in the middle of the crowd when the police started moving in,” she says. “I was screaming, ‘I am pregnant, I am pregnant. Let me through. I am trying to get out.'”

At that point, a Seattle police officer lifted his foot and it hit her in the stomach, and another officer pushed his bicycle into the crowd, again hitting Fox in the stomach. “Right before I turned, both cops lifted their pepper spray and sprayed me. My eyes puffed up and my eyes swelled shut,” she says. ….

Read more » BuzzFeed

Police pepper spraying and arresting Occupy Wall street protesters at UC Davis

» YouTube

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A Sleepy Campus In Crisis: Pepper Spray at UC Davis Sparks Online Uproar, Calls for a Chancellor’s Resignation

By Jens Erik Gould

When campus police demanded that 21-year-old Sophia Kamran and her fellow protesters dismantle the tents they had pitched on the quad at the University of California, Davis to protest tuition increases, they refused. Instead, as online videos of the incident depict, they sat peacefully with arms crossed as officers marched up to the protest line, one brandishing a can of pepper spray to those gathered, before dousing students repeatedly at point blank range. Protesters who covered their faces were sprayed under their shirts, and Kamran said one student vomited profusely after being sprayed directly in the mouth. “It was such an intense feeling. It felt like acid was being poured on our faces,” said Kamran, a philosophy and comparative literature major. “I was basically immobile and in a lot of pain.”

Friday’s pepper spray incident — which quickly went viral over the weekend after videos of the confrontation appeared online …

Read more » TIME.COM

DHA: authority within authority

PML-N to oppose DHA bill in parliament

“This draft is not only repugnant to basic tenant of the constitution but is also against the provincial autonomy, laws of Pakistan and international agreements,” said PML-N leader Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan.

ISLAMABAD: The Defence Housing Authority (DHA) bill may not be enacted into law as the main opposition party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), has decided to vehemently oppose the bill whenever it comes to the parliament.

“Whenever this bill is tabled before the National Assembly, Muslim League (N) will play its historic role by opposing it,” said the N-League spokesman on Thursday. …

Read more : DAWN