Name: Hana, aka "Hana"
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Web Site: http://www.globalpulsejournal.com
Bio: Hana Akselrod is a third-year MD/MPH student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. She is currently Editor-In-Chief of Global Pulse Journal and a member of AMSA's AIDS Advocacy Network SC.
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In Memoriam: Sujal Parikh
October 17th, 2010
(02/22/1985 – 10/12/2010)
In memory of our dear friend, colleague and activist, Sujal Parikh, whose brilliance was taken from us so unexpectedly. Your vision, dedication and passion will forever remain a shining beacon in this stormy world you worked so tirelessly to change.
We invite our readers to take some time to check out Sujal’s work, below, and to get in touch with us with any memories and thoughts you would like to share. Please email editorinchief.gp@gmail.com
Risk more than others think is safe,
Care more than others think is wise,
Dream more than others think is practical,
Expect more than others think is possible.
- Claude Bissel, quoted by Sujal Parikh
Interview with Eric Goosby
February 8th, 2010From Science Speaks, an excellent blog from the staff of the Infectious Diseases Center for Global Health Policy, comes an interview with Dr. Eric Goosby, the U.S. Global AIDS ambassador.
Q: Roxana Rogers, USAID’s South Africa health team leader, said recently in South Africa that, “US government funding is going to come down dramatically over the next five years.” True?
Read the rest of this entry “
Tamils risk all to flee Sri Lanka
November 22nd, 2009From Al Jazeera (English version):
The United Nations has welcomed the decision by Sri Lanka’s government to announce the release of the remaining 130,000 Tamils kept in detention camps for the last six months.
About 250,000 people fled the final bloody phase of the civil war between the government and separatist Tamil Tigers.
They were ultimately housed in government-run camps in the district of Vavuniya.
Hundreds of thousands of Tamils’ have been displaced in the fighting and are now living in hastily put together refugee camps that have been largely shut off from the outside world.
Guatemala declares calamity as food crisis grows
September 10th, 2009
Sisters Vidalia, left, and Maribel Agustin, who suffer from malnutrition, sit at a shelter in Guatemala in August.
Congo’s Rape Epidemic Worsens During U.S. Backed Military Operation
August 12th, 2009This is from the Washington Post (free subscription required):
For the women of eastern Congo, a U.S.-backed Congolese military operation meant to save them from abusive rebels has turned into a nightmare of its own.
An already staggering epidemic of rape has become markedly worse since the January deployment of tens of thousands of poorly trained, poorly paid Congolese soldiers, with people in front-line villages such as this one saying the soldiers are not so much hunting rebels as hunting women. Read the rest of this entry “
New global health resource from Kaiser Family Foundation
April 30th, 2009The Kaiser Family Foundation has a new resource for global health. While new, it features plenty of handy information for us global advocates, such as a map of cumulative cases of H1N1 influenza (the subtype of influenza A causing swine flu), convenient fact sheets on U.S. Global Health Policy, and a policy tracker in which you can follow up on the latest global health legislation.
When lobbying rules go berserk
March 30th, 2009This CNN article is from a week ago, and strangely appropriate to this blog. It deals with president Obama’s pledge to not include employ lobbyists to an agency they may have lobbied. Given the current economic crisis, some folks think this is is the right thing to do. Some obvious examples include Wall Street lobbyists working at the Treasury department, and defense contractors working at the Pentagon. However, it may not be the best choice in all cases:
Consider Tom Malinowski. He’s the advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, an expert on genocide and torture. But when it came time for a top human rights job at the State Department, he was turned away.
Why? “Because he lobbied against torture,” says one incredulous administration official. “It’s crazy.”
But the rules are the rules: The ethics code requires that no lobbyist can be hired to work for an agency he may have lobbied.
So, just to clarify: Someone like Malinowski who lobbied against torture and is a widely acknowledged expert on international human rights law is, er, blackballed. More to the point, he was shown the door precisely because he tried to influence Congress on an issue that both he and the administration agree, and care deeply about. (Malinowski won’t comment.)
I think president Obama’s original intent was to avoid conflicts of interest, but can we agree this is a bit extreme? Advocating against torture is not the same as ripping off taxpayers on the behest of a giant insurance company.
Guardian Investigation Uncovers Evidence of War Crimes in Gaza
March 26th, 2009Following up on a previous post, the Guardian newspaper, in an explosive article, has compiled “detailed evidence of alleged war crimes committed by Israel during the 23-day offensive in the Gaza Strip earlier this year, involving the use of Palestinian children as human shields and the targeting of medics and hospitals”.
It also has produced 3 documentaries detailing their investigation. Be sure to watch them all:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy6-FZz69lE]
Part 1 deals with deals with the allegations of using children as human shields by the Israeli army.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2UuQ8V5DvY&feature=channel]
Part 2 deals with the targeting of medics and medical facilities. According to the World Health Organization, more than half of Gaza’s 27 hospitals and 44 clinics were damaged by Israeli bombs.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ToZTtGOr0k&feature=channel]
Part 3 deals with drones targeting civilians.
In a report from March 23, Physicians for Human Rights Israel mentions:
there was “certainty” that Israel violated international humanitarian law during the three-week war in January, with attacks on medics, damage to medical buildings, indiscriminate attacks on civilians and delays in medical treatment for the injured.
“We have noticed a stark decline in IDF morals concerning the Palestinian population of Gaza, which in reality amounts to a contempt for Palestinian lives,” said Dani Filc, chairman of Physicians for Human Rights Israel. The Guardian gathered testimony on missile attacks by Israeli drones against clearly distinguishable civilian targets. In one case a family of six was killed when a missile hit the courtyard of their house. Israel has not admitted using drones but experts say their optical equipment is good enough to identify individual items of clothing worn by targets. The Geneva convention makes it clear medical staff and hospitals are not legitimate targets and forbids involuntary human shields.“
Israeli soldiers admit to deliberate killing of Gaza civilians
March 24th, 2009The Israeli army has been forced to open an investigation into the conduct of its troops in Gaza after damning testimony from its own front line soldiers revealed the killing of civilians and rules of engagement so lax that one combatant said that they amounted on occasion to “cold-blooded murder”.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights released the names of 1,417 Gazans that it says were killed in the war, saying that 926 were civilians. The Israeli Government contends that most of those killed were combatants or legitimate targets.
According the article:
The soldiers’ testimonies include accounts of an unarmed old woman being shot at a distance of 100 yards, a woman and her two children being killed after Israeli soldiers ordered them from their house into the line of fire of a sniper and soldiers clearing houses by shooting anyone they encountered on sight.
“That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy, who asked him why a company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot.
The BBC has covered this as well.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rPO1v3Uc1c]
To some, “collateral damage” is just a by-product of war, or at least what we tell ourselves in order to somehow justify the loss of innocent civilians. However, what if there is another reason for this violence? What if harming others, in this case Palestinians, is indirectly encouraged? Some Israeli soldiers spoke to Haaretz about their experiences. Even more troubling is an article published 4 days ago, which documents how graduating Israeli soldiers design special shirts to commemorate the occasion.
From the article:
Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques – these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription “Better use Durex,” next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, “1 shot, 2 kills.” A “graduation” shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, “No matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it.“
New Mexico Repeals Death Penalty
March 21st, 2009From the New Mexico Independent:
The Bill Richardson who announced a repeal of the death penalty in New Mexico on Wednesday was not the same Bill Richardson who usually shows up for face time with the news media.
The Richardson who usually hosts the media goes out of his way to convince you of the rightness of his decision. He is confident, bigger than life and even becomes jocular at times; he is a master of the room.
The Richardson who sat before a phalanx of news media Wednesday was anything but. At moments he appeared still to be working out the issue in his head and doubt occasionally crept in to darken his face.
Are there people who deserve the death penalty? Is it right for the state to execute a killer? What about the flaws in the system? And what of the United States’ general approval of the death penalty when compared to most Western democracies?
As a human rights advocate, I do not condone violence, even upon those that by virtue of their crimes, deserve some punishment. However, this is a thorny issue, especially to the family and friends of the victims. Who will explain to them their loss will not be avenged? That the perpetrators deserve the right to live, when they grossly violated the life and dignity of others? Gov. Richardson was sensitive about this.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DDACK-kJwY]
Though some law enforcement agents do not approve of the decision, Gov. Richardson does rightly argue minorities are over-represented in the prison population and on death row, and said the U.S. is out of step with most Western democracies, including those in the European Union, that ban capital punishment.
What do you think?