Help Make Change Happen: Daily Brief
How to make change happen in California and Tajikistan; engineered hysteria over boat migration reaches new level of absurdity; Merkel visits Southern Causasus, should discuss rights; action needed to address racial disparity in US cervical cancer deaths; free expression in the crosshairs in Uganda; and the latest blasphemy outrage from Indonesia.
Do you ever wonder what you can do to make change happen? There's actually a lot that you can do. One example: join campaigns for reforms in California to protect rights of children...
...and to stop mass incarceration and racial disparities in California prisons.
A lot of hard work is still needed in California, but success is possible. For an example, check this amazing news from Tajikistan:
Engineered hysteria over boat migration across the Mediterranean – at its lowest in years – has reached a whole new level of absurdity. The Italian government is holding its own coast guard and 177 rescued persons hostage in a cynical gambit to force other European Union countries to take the migrants and asylum seekers.
This week marks German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first trip to the South Caucasus region, where she will visit Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan for meetings with each country’s leader. All three countries face critical human rights issues, and this is an important opportunity for Merkel to raise these concerns.
Did you know that black women in the United States are more than twice as likely to die from cervical cancer – a preventable disease – as white women? Health insurance coverage for a comprehensive cervical cancer screening strategy has been expanded this week, but will it help address this disparity? Read our comment.
A video of soldiers beating and arresting photojournalist James Akena in Uganda has rightly caused outrage.
And there's news from Indonesia, where a woman has been sentenced to 1.5 years in prison because she complained about noise pollution from a mosque. Blasphemy, apparently...