I find it endlessly fascinating that most humans just want someone who will get up in the middle of the night to close the windows with them when it starts down pouring. We want someone to dry our dishes after we wash them. We just want another person to do mundane activities with. We want to tell someone how the copy machine broke at work and we want to listen to how Debra is causing office drama again. We just want something so simple. We want human connection and honesty and to be bored with someone else instead of bored alone.
This Saturday, April 14th, night we will be camping outside of LA City Hall until 6.00am Sunday morning April 15th. We will be camping out in solidarity with the thousands of homeless women who are forced to sleep outside due to the severe lack of shelters in Los Angeles.
We are demanding that Mayor Garcetti and the City Council of LA appropriate $20 million in the discretionary budget towards sheltering 1000 women by August 2018. We must have this action as the City budget will be voted on Friday, April 20th, 2018. We are also demanding that the Mayor and City Council promise to take immediate action to secure a minimum of 8 separate location to accommodate shelters for 1000 women.
We welcome all citizens of Los Angeles to join us in this action of justice towards securing the shelter and protection of our homeless women of Los Angeles! #SheDoes – #SheDoes Deserve Shelter & Protection. #endhomelessness #decolonize #property #humanity (at Los Angeles City Hall)
“Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
It is Easter, and Christians around the world celebrate to remember the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has redeemed the world from death; yet it is only too visceral to realise that at this very moment in our lives, much political and humanitarian strife remains - the war in Syria, the Senkaku island disputes between China and Japan, the South Korean ferry disaster - and there is still so much more to be done. Have we truly moved on from atrocities such as the Cold War and the Holocaust?
But this redemption is not just commemorating the death and life of a god; redemption is only complete insofar as we are moved to be there for others, amidst apparent despair, because of hope; to neglect this second step of loving from the first step of believing, is to do injustice to the entire theology of things altogether.
The dichotomy of Christianity and atheism aside, we must always remember that love can and must exist amidst suffering, and we must always be there for others, regardless.
#Palestine || The Palestinian young man Qassim Rajabi (39) who was injured after being assaulted by the Israeli occupation forces while demolishing his family shop in Silwan village, this morning. Via @silwanic
اصابة الشاب قاسم حربي الرجبي 39عاما بجروح في رأسه جراء الاعتداء عليه بالضرب بأعقاب البنادق خلال تنفيذ هدم محل العائلة التجاري في حي البستان في سلوان.
The extensive cloud of debris Russia’s anti-satellite test created
Early this week, Russia launched a missile that destroyed the country’s Kosmos 1408 satellite, a large spacecraft that orbited the Earth roughly 300 miles up. The breakup of the satellite created at least 1,500 pieces of trackable fragments, according to the US State Department, as well as thousands of smaller pieces that cannot be tracked.
All of those pieces are still in low Earth orbit, moving at thousands of miles an hour and posing a threat to any objects that might cross their path. Initially, that even included the International Space Station, with crew members on board forced to take shelter in their spacecrafts as the debris cloud from the satellite passed by the ISS a couple of times.
It’s going to take weeks or even months to fully understand just how bad the situation is, but early visualizations of the ASAT test created by satellite trackers show an extensive trail of space debris left in the wake of the breakup.
The fragments appear like a dotted snake in orbit, stretching out and moving in roughly the same direction that Kosmos 1408 used to move around Earth. And there’s one thing the visualizers agree on: this snake of debris isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. “There will be some potential collision risk to most satellites in [low Earth orbit] from the fragmentation of Cosmos 1408 over the next few years to decades,” LeoLabs, a private space tracking company in the US sais.
A screengrab of a visualization, created by Hugh Lewis
The Colour of the Climate Crisis is a project by Do The Green Thing, an environmental social initiative that uses creativity to combat the climate crisis. Come say hi.
Professor Ed Hawkins’ data visualisation, Warming Stripes!
It started at Hay Literary Festival. Professor Ed Hawkins was trying to find a way to communicate climate change to an audience that might not be able to interpret scientific graphics or data.
Those stripes — shades of red and blue representing hot and cold temperatures — chart temperature changes from 1850 to 2018, running from left to right. They look like a bar code, albeit a vibrant one with a serious message. Hawkins, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, says that the impact was immediately obvious.
That data visualisation was based on local temperatures for the festival’s location in rural Wales. Since the 2018 festival, Hawkins has worked on a graphic for global temperatures. Most recently, it took centre stage at a very different festival: as the backdrop for Enter Shikari’s set at Reading.
On 21 June 2019, the summer solstice, he launched a website where users can view and download climate stripes for the cities they live in, from Vienna to Verona. So far there have been more than a million downloads.
Warming Stripes from 1850-2020 for GLOBE / Europe / Asia / North America.
Observed every 10 October, the World Day Against the Death Penalty unifies the global abolitionist movement and mobilizes civil society, political leaders, lawyers, public opinion and more to support the call for universal abolition of capital punishment. The day encourages and consolidates the political and general awareness of the world-wide movement against the death penalty.
On 10 October 2021, the World Day will be dedicated to women who risk being sentenced to death, who have received a death sentence, who have been executed, and to those who have had their death sentences commuted, exonerated, or pardoned.
Extensive discrimination based on sex and gender, often coupled with other elements of identity, such as age, sexual orientation, disability, and race expose women to intersecting forms of structural inequalities. Such prejudices can weigh heavily on sentencing, including when women are stereotyped as an evil mother, a witch, or a femme fatale. This discrimination can also lead to critical mitigating factors not being considered during arrest and trial, such as being subjected to gender-based violence and abuse.
While working towards the complete abolition of the death penalty worldwide for all crimes and for all genders, it is crucial to sound the alarm on the discrimination women face and the consequences such discrimination can have on a death sentence.
THE DEATH PENALTY IN PRACTICE:
(Statistics from Amnesty International unless otherwise specified)
Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide estimates that there are at least 800 women sentenced to death around the world.
At least 7 countries are confirmed to have a woman under the sentence of death in 2020: Ghana, Japan, Maldives, Taiwan, Thailand, USA, Zambia. The number of countries is, in reality much higher, like in Saudi Arabia and Iran, but where there is no accurate breakdown of death-row statistics by gender.
In 2020, amongst the 483 individuals who were executed, 16 were women located in Egypt, Iran, Oman and Saudi Arabia.
108 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes.
28 countries are abolitionist in practice
55 countries are retentionist.
In 2020, the 5 countries that carried out the most executions were: China, Iran, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
World Animal Day is an international day of action for animal rights and welfare celebrated annually on October 4.
It is the 96th World Animal Welfare Day on 4th October, 2021 with the theme for world animal day 2021 is “Forests and Livelihoods: Sustaining People and Planet.”
It’s celebrated in different ways in every country, irrespective of nationality, religion, faith or political ideology.
Through increased awareness and education we can create a world where animals are always recognised as sentient beings and full regard is always paid to their welfare.
The COVID-19 pandemic is taking a detrimental toll on the Earth’s oceans: researchers say around 30% more waste has made its way into the seas in the last year, primarily non-recyclable materials like face masks and plastic take-out containers. In Şebnem Coşkun’s underwater photograph taken in the Bosporus Strait, the ethereal, translucent bodies of jellyfish drift vertiginously in a whirlpool of plastic and debris; a diver reaches for a face mask floating ominously in the center.
Coşkun, a Turkish artist and photojournalist, is the third place winner of this year’s Nature Conservancy Photo Contest in the “People and Nature” category. The figure in her stunning image is free diver Şahika Ercümen, Turkey’s multiple world record holder and United Nations environmental advocate, captured collecting trash near the Ortaköy coastline on June 27, 2020.
Abouthalf a million tons of plastic are dumped into the Mediterranean every year — the equivalent of 33,800 plastic bottles entering the sea each minute, Coşkun notes in a statement about the photograph.
“Ever since I started scuba diving in 2014, the things that have impressed me the most underwater have been floating plastic and waste. I thought there was a world underwater that would fascinate me, but this sight shocked me,” she informed Hyperallergic. “Then I started working on marine litter. I was working as a photojournalist at Anadolu Agency and I started taking pictures to show the other side of this world.”
“After I started to see the waste, I stopped buying the water sold in plastic bottles. If my encounter with waste has changed me so much, I think it can change everyone,” Coşkun added.
The use of face coverings and different private protecting tools (PPE) has confirmed important to assist curb the unfold of coronavirus, however these things have to be rigorously discarded to keep away from harming marine wildlife and ecosystems. Encouraging reusable masks and implementing insurance policies to cease littering may help, in line with the conservation group OceansAsia.
Nature Conservancy Photo Contest in the “People and Nature”
Legal abortion saves the lives of millions of women,
Abortion must be legalized EVERYWHERE!
28 September marks International Safe Abortion Day. For this year’s international day of action, stakeholders around the world are coming together behind the call “Make Unsafe Abortion History”.
Access to safe abortion is time-sensitive essential health care. It is included in numerous international, regional and national legally binding treaties – providing access to safe abortion is imperative for women and girls to achieve their human and reproductive rights.
Unsafe abortion remains a preventable public health tragedy and a violation of women and girls’ human rights. It accounts for 13% of global maternal mortalities, with hundreds of thousands of survivors living with long-term complications, including infertility and chronic pain.
With121 million unintended pregnancies each year – and few countries with legal to safe abortion – too many women and girls who do not want to become parents are forced to remain pregnant. This not only represents a denial of their autonomy, but it may also have serious consequences for their mental health and access to opportunities to achieve their life goals.
For many women, this is so unacceptable that they are forced to place themselves in extreme danger by undergoing unsafe abortions. We know it is women and girls who are often already marginalised – such as those living in poverty and rural areas – who pay the greatest toll and are at the highest risk of unsafe abortion, as well as maternal mortality and morbidity.
Originally “Campaña 28 Septiembre” (or “Campaign of September 28”), the day of action was declared official in 2011 by the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights, and renamed in 2015. The new name, “International Safe Abortion Day”, took aim at unifying the different participating organizations and their respective political aims.
The history of this day is rooted in slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, specifically in the concept of the “free womb”. “Free womb” laws were enacted for slave women who had been killing their children after birth to spare them from a life of slavery. The law ensured that children born to slave women would be considered free from birth; before the law was put into place, children born to slave mothers were automatically considered the property of the slave owner. The day of action was adopted by many groups to promote universal access to safe abortions and education about reproductive health.
![[Lovers at the Memorial of the Holocaust] “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for thi](https://64.media.tumblr.com/693d9e83aad8d26a3b67e67e03a0fb45/tumblr_n4964eHXre1r3dvueo1_1280.jpg "[Lovers at the Memorial of the Holocaust] “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for thi")
