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Brazilian bishops decry conditions in prisons – Vatican News

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Brazilian bishops decry conditions in prisons - Vatican News

By Lisa Zengarini

Amidst growing cases of COVID-19 infection and Covid-related deaths, Brazilian prisons have also recorded a significant increase of torture and inhumane treatments incidents, a recent Church report says.

According to the Report “The Pandemic of Torture in Prison”, which was published on January 22, between March 15 and October 31st the Prison Ministry Office of the Bishops’ Conference of Brazil (CNBB) received 90 complaints of ill-treatments all over the Country, against 53 in the same period of the previous year. Commenting the increase, Lucas Gonçalves, Coordinator of the national Prison Ministry, says the report confirms that torture “is not a matter of the past, but something that is well present in prisoners’ daily life in Brazil”.  Violence includes physical abuse, as well as humiliating treatments and deprivations, like denying yard time to prisoners. Moreover, the report points out that inmates are denied access to health treatment, food and personal hygiene items: nearly 75% per cent of the claims concern violations of the basic right to healthcare. 

Most claims, however, are ignored by judiciary authorities, who are inclined to believe they are false. Often the State even refuses to enquire the cases: only 8 claims out of the 90 reported by the Prison Ministry were followed by an investigation.

Impact of pandemic on prison inmates

The Church report emphasizes the dramatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the over-populated Brazilian prisons, also criticizing President Jair Bolsonaro for continuously underplaying the Coronavirus crisis. With over 800.000 inmates, men and women, Brazil is the third Country in the world, after China and the United States, with the highest prison population, making prisoners particularly exposed to the infection, which has recorded an increase by 800 per cent between May and June last year. In the same  period the death-toll in Brazilian prisons increased by 100 per cent

According to the national Prison Ministry, the pandemic has highlighted the “cruelty” of Brazilian prison system, as well as its discriminatory nature against certain ethnical communities. The report aims at bringing to light this dark reality, while advocating for a change and for alternatives to jail incarceration.

European Parliament to commemorate 76 years since the liberation of Auschwitz

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Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Poland - Some views of the Auschwitz-Birkenau old concentration camps, in Oświęcim - A barbed wire fence around the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp

A virtual ceremony, including speeches by European Parliament President David Sassoli and guests, will be held on Wednesday 27 January.

The European Parliament will mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a virtual ceremony, 76 years after the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp was liberated on 27 January 1945. You can follow the ceremony live here.

The ceremony will be opened at 10.00 with a speech by the President of the European Parliament David Sassoli and a performance of traditional Yiddish songs by Gilles Sadowsky (clarinet) and Hanna Bardos (voice).

This will be followed by remote speeches from the President of the Conference of European Rabbis, Chief Rabbi of Moscow, Mr Pinchas Goldschmidt and from Mr Gyula Sárközi, dancer, choreographer and representative of the Roma community.

The commemoration will conclude with a minute of silence in honour of the victims of the Holocaust and the prayer El Maleh Rahamim, recited by Israel Muller, Chief Cantor of the Great Synagogue of Europe in Brussels.

***

Pinchas Goldschmidt (born 21 July 1963 in Zurich/Switzerland) has been the Chief Rabbi of Moscow since 1993, serving at the Moscow Choral Synagogue. He also founded and has been the head of the Moscow Rabbinical Court of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) since 1989. Since 20011, he has served as President of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), which unites over seven hundred communal rabbis from Dublin to Khabarovsk.

Gyula Sárközi (born 12 January 1962 in Budapest/Hungary) is a dancer, ballet master and choreographer as well as founder of the Madách School of Musical Dance and Vocational High School. From 1982 to 2009, he worked at the Hungarian State Opera House as soloist and ballet master. In 2001, he founded the Madách School with the aim of training professional musical dancers. Coming from a poor Roma family, Mr Sárközi considers it important to support disadvantaged children in their education.

Sri Lanka: ‘Forced’ cremation of COVID victims’ bodies must stop – UN rights experts

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Sri Lanka: ‘Forced’ cremation of COVID victims’ bodies must stop - UN rights experts

In a joint appeal, Special Rapporteurs Ahmed Shaheed, Fernand de Varennes, Clément Nyaletsossi Voule and Tlaleng Mofokeng, said that the practice ran contrary to the beliefs of Muslims and other minorities.

It ran the risk of increasing prejudice, intolerance and violence, they said in a statement, insisting that no medical or scientific evidence indicated that burying the deceased increased the risk of spreading communicable diseases such as COVID-19.

To date, more than 270 COVID-19 deaths have been reported in Sri Lanka; a significant number have come from the minority Muslim community.

All of the deceased were cremated in line with amended health guidelines for COVID-19 patients, which were issued on last March.

‘Aggressive nationalism’

“We deplore the implementation of such public health decisions based on discrimination, aggressive nationalism and ethnocentrism amounting to persecution of Muslims and other minorities in the country” the experts said.

“Such hostility against the minorities exacerbates existing prejudices, intercommunal tensions, and religious intolerance, sowing fear and distrust while inciting further hatred and violence”, they added.

“We are equally concerned that such a policy deters the poor and the most vulnerable from accessing public healthcare over fears of discrimination”, they said, noting that it would further negatively impact the public health measures to contain the pandemic.

‘Immediate’ cremation

Information received by the experts indicates that cremation often takes place immediately after test results are provided, without granting family members reasonable time or the opportunity to cross check or receive the final test results.

There have been several cases of cremations based on erroneous information about COVID-19 test results, the experts said.

They noted that the President and Prime Minister had instructed the health authorities to explore options for burials in Sri Lanka.

Disregard

“However, we are concerned to learn that the recommendation to include both cremation and burial options for the disposal of bodies of COVID-19 victims by a panel of experts appointed by the State Minister for Primary Health Services, Pandemics and COVID Prevention, was reportedly disregarded by the Government”, they said.

“We strongly urge the Government of Sri Lanka to stop the forced cremation of COVID-19 bodies, to take all necessary measures to combat disinformation, hate speech and stigmatization” of Muslims and other minorities, “as a vector of the pandemic, and to provide remedy and ensure accountability for cremations that were carried out by error.”

Special Rapporteurs and independent experts are appointed by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council and are neither UN staff nor paid for their work.

Racism webinar touches on religion, faith

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Racism webinar touches on religion, faith

STAMFORD — Fittingly, Stamford Stands Against Racism’s first discussion on racism and faith opened with a prayer.

“We come together today in a spirit of listening and learning — to engage with one another around the topic and the plague that is often taboo to discuss in our culture: racism,” said the Rev. Shelley Donaldon of First Presbyterian Church.

“It is racism that plagues us all regardless of who we are, or where we come from, or what race we identify as,” she continued. “May these conversations help guide each of us in our lives. May it be so.”



Donaldson closed with an “amen,” before turning back to the group.

The meeting, moderated by diversity consultant and longtime member of St. Mark’s Church in New Canaan Lise Leist, brought together faith leaders from across lower Fairfield County to talk about how race impacts their lives, faiths and collective work.

A second discussion on the topic is set for Jan. 26.

“Justice. Justice you shall pursue, the Torah tells us,” said Cantor Jill Abramson of Congregation Shir Ami in Greenwich. “And we cannot pursue justice, right now, without addressing racism.”

Leist navigated a conversation between Abramson, the Rev. Dr. Michael Christie of Stamford’s Union Bapist Church and Maher Hussein, President of the Islamic Center of N.Y., also in Stamford.

While Abramson maintained that the work of faith is synonymous with the work of anti-racism, Christie reminded the audience that religious institutions have oftentimes upheld systemic racism in the United States.

“The church is not innocent with this. They’re probably the most guilty party,” said Christie. “The church has to really own… the historical role of the church in structural racism and white supremacy Christianity, which we’ve kind of seen played out in the evangelical movement.”

But faith can also help communities of color move through the racial traumas that they face, Christie said, particularly for Black and brown people.

“A good example: A lot of black culture, in terms of our dancing and our music, we … now are discovering through the sciences… it’s our way, in part, of intuitively … dealing with trauma,” he added. “The way we express ourselves in churches, dancing and clapping our hands, (it’s) another way of the community dealing with the trauma.”

Hussein, in contrast, spoke to the value of watching Muslims of all races worship together at the Islamic Cultural Center. In his experience, worship in Islam hasn’t been divided by race in the same way other faiths have in America.

“I see the difference between an African American and white church. But as a Muslim, we don’t have that,” said Hussein. “We all pray equal.”

The webinar was the first of two installments on the intersections of race and religion.

In partnership with Stamford Cradle to Career and Community Health Center, Stamford Stands Against Racism has held other talks that highlight the relationship between race and non-profit work, how adverse experiences impact children of color, and processing trauma.

Cradle to Career and Stamford Stands Against Racism will hold its second discussion on race and religion from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Jan. 26 via Zoom at https://bit.ly/2KNeRzn.

Beginning review – shocking but shallow tale of religion and bigotry

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Peter Bradshaw
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Beginning review – shocking but shallow tale of religion and bigotry

This is the much-admired feature debut of Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili, part of the official selection for last year’s cancelled Cannes film festival, where it might well have been a shock-cinema talking point had the event gone ahead. It is co-produced by the Mexican film-maker Carlos Reygadas, whose influence is very apparent, and the movie as a whole is an intensely, indeed overbearingly, curated and controlled experience. It is a succession of disquieting tableaux, shot mainly from fixed camera positions in which the relevant action can be happening very far away, and one of the speakers can be off-camera for long periods: a cinema in the high style of Haneke, Farhadi and Kiarostami.

Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili) and David (Rati Oneli, the co-writer) are a devout Jehovah’s Witness couple with a child who preside over a newly-built prayer house in a remote community. When a religious meeting is firebombed by bigoted locals, David makes an official complaint to the (equally bigoted) police about their marked lack of effort or interest in finding the culprits, and makes a trip to Tbilisi to discuss matters with community elders. Meanwhile, Yana is left behind and is menaced and assaulted by someone claiming to be a cop.

The central rape scene is very disturbingly shot and there is also what I admit is a potent final sequence, imagining some kind of retribution or spiritual degradation happening to the assailant in geological time. But there is something inert and frankly shallow in the film: a refrigerated mannerism in which rape and religious beliefs are both kinds of arthouse artefact, not made any more authentic or compelling by the suggestions of Yana’s own ambiguous attitude to what has just happened.

Kulumbegashvili’s style is confident, if derivative. Her technique now has to evolve away from these self-conscious influences.

• Beginning is available on Mubi from 29 January.

Chiesi USA, Inc. Receives Top Employer in the U.S. Certification for 2021

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Chiesi USA, Inc. Receives Top Employer in the U.S. Certification for 2021


Chiesi USA, Inc. Receives Top Employer in the U.S. Certification for 2021 – Book Publishing Industry Today – EIN Presswire




















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China Catching Up to US in Artificial Intelligence, Brexit to Hit EU’s AI Capabilities, Report Says

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China Catching Up to US in Artificial Intelligence, Brexit to Hit EU's AI Capabilities, Report Says

China is catching up to the United States in the ongoing rivalry for the top spot as the global leader in artificial intelligence (AI), research from a top think tank on science and technology revealed on Monday.
Despite the US leading in the development and implementation of AI, China is quickly rising and the European Union is lagging behind the former two, the report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found.
According to the 2020 report, the US holds the leading position at 44.6 out of 100 points, with China catching up at 32 points and the EU at 23.3 points, respectively.

While the US leads in startup investment and research and development (R&D), China was making significant progress and held the largest number of supercomputers in the world at 214, compared to 113 and 91 in the US and EU, respectively

“The Chinese government has made AI a top priority and the results are showing. The United States and European Union need to pay attention to what China is doing and respond, because nations that lead in the development and use of AI will shape its future and significantly improve their economic competitiveness, while those that fall behind risk losing competitiveness in key industries,” Daniel Castro, ITIF innovation centre director and lead report author said as quoted by the South China Morning Post.

But the EU was behind in investments, including venture capital and private equity funding, but scored higher in the number of published research papers compared with the US, the report added.

China, the EU and US had published 24,929, 20,418 and 16,233 reports on AI in 2018, respectively, it read.

The EU’s AI capabilities had also been diminished by the United Kingdom’s exit from the bloc “both in absolute terms and on a per-capita basis”, the report added.

China Steps Up Made in 2025 Initiative, Funding Amid Trade War

The report comes amid China’s increased efforts to invest in emerging technologies via a $1.4tn initiative in line with the State Council’s Made in China programme aimed at decoupling the mainland from foreign technologies. The plan will invest in new technologies in AI, semiconductors, green energy, 5G and infrastructure, among many others, over the next five years.
The news follows Washington’s acrimonious trade war with Beijing under the Trump administration, who restricted numerous Chinese tech firms from access to US technologies, including major chipmakers and software firms in May 2019.
The former Trump administration also blacklisted key Chinese firms such as Huawei, ZTE, Shanghai-based chipmaker SMIC, and over 70 others in recent months, citing national security concerns, which Beijing has repeatedly refuted as false.

Washington also blocked access to Beijing-based tech firm Xiaomi and telcos such as China Unicom, China Mobile and China Telecom in a last-ditch effort for US president Donald Trump to expand his administration’s trade war before leaving office.

EU No Longer Considers Juan Guaido Venezuela’s Interim President

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EU No Longer Considers Juan Guaido Venezuela's Interim President

The European Union has announced that, despite regarding Juan Guaido as a “privileged interlocutor”, it no longer considers him an interim president of Venezuela.

The 27 members of the block said in a joint statement that Guaido is a part of the democratic opposition, despite a recent European Parliament’s resolution for EU governments to maintain Guaido’s position as head of state.

“The EU repeats its calls for… the freedom and safety of all political opponents, in particular representatives of the opposition parties elected to the National Assembly of 2015, and especially Juan Guaido,” the statement said following a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels.

Last week, Guaido thanked the European Parliament for recognising him as president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, arguing that the 2020 parliamentary elections were fraudulent.

The EU, however, stopped referring to Guaido as the Venezuela’s “acting president” after his National Assembly leadership mandate expired earlier this month.

The European Union recognised Juan Guaido as president of Venezuela in January 2019, following calls from Washington to declare him as head of state.

While the Trump administration had unsuccessfully sought to put pressure on the international community to replace Maduro, Joe Biden had already said that he would be willing to “negotiate” with Maduro to put an end to the ongoing political and economic crisis , adding that he isn’t going to demand the Venezuelan president’s resignation as a precondition to ending US sanctions. 

WHO and Germany deliver critical medical supplies to Western Balkans countries to strengthen COVID-19 response and save lives

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WHO and Germany deliver critical medical supplies to Western Balkans countries to strengthen COVID-19 response and save lives

WHO has partnered with the German Government to deliver medical supplies worth 3.65 million euros to countries in the Western Balkan region. These supplies – 334 ventilators and 19 400 pulse oximeters – will equip health facilities to monitor and improve the health outcomes of COVID-19 patients, particularly in intensive care units.

The shipments were distributed at the end of 2020 to hospitals across the 5 countries of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia, as well as Kosovo (in accordance with UN Security Council resolution 1244 (1999)). All these materials meet WHO quality and safety standards to keep frontline health care workers and patients safe and prevent the spread of COVID-19. They will serve the immediate needs of countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as strengthen the capacities of hospitals for future health emergencies.

“Equity and solidarity are at the core of everything WHO does,” says Dr Dorit Nitzan, WHO Regional Emergency Director for Europe. “One of our main roles in this pandemic has been to assist countries in their response efforts, taking stock of international capacity and resources, and we are extremely grateful to see many forms of solidarity in action.” This donation was made possible through a very good cooperation between Germany, the Western Balkan countries and WHO and we are grateful for it.”

“As Europe continues to fight against the COVID-19 virus, no one is safe until everyone is, and European solidarity is key,” says Susanne Baumann, Head of the Federal Foreign Office’s Directorate-General for International Order, the United Nations and Arms Control. “This is why the German Government committed to provide tangible support to countries in the Western Balkans, equipping them with life-saving equipment to strengthen our collective response. This delivery follows previous supply provision and has happened in close collaboration with WHO.”

WHO remains a committed partner supporting governmental efforts to strengthen preparedness and response for COVID-19 and beyond.

Renewables overtook fossil fuels in EU electricity mix in 2020: Report

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Renewables overtook fossil fuels in EU electricity mix in 2020: Report

… overtook fossil fuels as the European Union‘s main source of … : Electricity production share (%) in EU 27 – https:/… overall electricity demand in the EU last year, but the impact …

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