Human Rights Watch Fraud; Digital Textbook Spyware; US Executions Violate Intl Law; Youth Prison Slavery; $500M Student Debt Burned; DeBlasio Funds Charters

NWO’s Human Rights Watch FRAUD Group Goes Viral Nobel Peace Prize laureates, a former UN assistant secretary general, a UN special rapporteur, and over 100 scholars are asking HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth in an open letter about appointing Miguel Diaz to its advisory commitee. Did Human Rights watch think the world is too apathetic to care or too dumbed-down to notice?  In a way, this CIA appointment could not be better for real human rights advocates, who’ve tried to warn the world for years about Human Rights Watch (and Amnesty International) but have been branded too radical for such disclosures.

The Money-Making Spies Inside Digital Textbooks. With the expressed goal of identifying problems in learning, tech companies are monitoring the mouse clicks, keystrokes and “split-second hesitation[s]” of 4 million children across the country, Politico reports. The amount of data being collected is staggering. Ed tech companies of all sizes, from basement startups to global conglomerates, have jumped into the game. The most adept are scooping up as many as 10 million unique data points on each child, each day. That’s orders of magnitude more data than Netflix or Facebook or even Google collect on their users.

ACLU: Missouri and Oklahoma Executions Will Violate International Law. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a petition with the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights showing that the upcoming executions by lethal injection in Missouri and Oklahoma will most certainly violate international law against torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, should they go forward. The ACLU asks that the executions be stopped until the IACHR can conduct independent investigations of the two cases.

National Week Of Action Against Incarcerating Youth. There is an urgent need to find constructive ways to respond to young people in conflict with the law. Research compellingly demonstrates that youth placed in juvenile detention centers compared to alternative interventions are much more likely to later spend significant time in prison. Juvenile and adult incarceration both create exorbitant financial and social costs. Incarceration of juveniles is harmful to young peoples’ development, education, families, communities, and their current and future socioeconomic status. 

Chilean Artist Sets Fire To $500m Worth Of Student Debt Papers. A heap of ashes is allegedly all that remains of $500 million in “pagarés” — or debt papers — stolen and burned by a Chilean activist. A video by Francisco Tapia, aka “Papas Fritas,” went viral this week in which he confessed to burning the legal papers certifying debt owed by Universidad del Mar students and had thus liberated the students from their debt obligations.

De Blasio Quietly Adds Hundreds Of Millions For Charters. When Mayor Bill de Blasio held a news conference on Monday touting his recent educational budget commitments, he highlighted additional money he will spend on arts programs ($20 million), after-school activities for middle schools ($145 million) and his signature proposal, universal pre-kindergarten ($300 million). He did not mention the multi-million-dollar boost for charter schools. Tucked in a 291-page document related to the Fiscal Year 2015 budget he unveiled on May 8 are two increases to charter schools: $26.9 million for the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, and an extra $219.7 million for next year. 

Sources: Before It’s News, Common Dreams, Popular Resistance, Truthdig.

Paul Brown is a retired neuroscience professor whose primary interests are human rights, overpopulation, mass extinction, global warming, and the military-industrial complex. Links to all his Before It’s News articles are at /contributor/pages/189/210/stories.html.