NEWSBYCLARA LONG

If you're my age or older you may know her from her Academy Award winning performance in Children of a Lesser God? Maybe you know her from her feisty character in the West Wing, Joey Lucas?  Or for the younger ones out there for her roles in Desperate Housewives or the L-Word?

Marlee Matlin deserves some thanks from the Change.org human rights community.   Last week, Marlee wrote on her twitter account:

Dear Netflix. Nevermind about the price hike. When are you going to start captioning your streaming content? Fail, big time.

That's what we're saying!  Netflix , the internet's biggest provider of streaming online television and movies provides subtitling for only 30 percent of its online content.  Worse, while it is possible to see a list of all of the subtitled content on the site, but users cannot search within that content.

It’s been a hard day.  Why don’t we just kick back and watch a movie?  We don’t even have to go to the video store now, we can just stream a film online.

Not if you are deaf or hard of hearing.

Netflix, the leading provider of streamed television and movies over the Internet, fails to offer a simple search option that would allow the deaf and hard of hearing to search their catalogue of subtitled movies.  Deaf and hard of hearing activists are asking for that to change.

Sebastian St. Troy, who is living with HIV, lost his hearing last December after being diagnosed with a non-cancerous brain tumor.

“Since I started rely on captioning I’ve learned how few entertainment options exist for the deaf and hard-of-hearing,” he said.  “Netflix has been promising captioning for years, but not really following through.”

When he took office in 2007, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick seemed like someone who would stand up for the rights of immigrants. Indeed, former Governor Mitt Romney had recently signed an authorization for Massachusetts state troopers to detain undocumented immigrants and charge them with violating immigration law.  Governor Patrick rescinded it and immigrant communities breathed a sigh of relief.

Three years later, Governor Patrick has changed his stripes.  His administration announced late last week that it would sign an agreement with the federal government under the ironically-named Secure Communities initiative, which would require state law enforcement officers to run the fingerprints of all arrested persons against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database.

We need to tell Governor Patrick to think again.

The Secure Communities initiative is marketed as a way for the immigration enforcement agency to focus on removing the "right people," that is criminal immigrants.   The problem is, it doesn't actually work that way.   Instead, rights advocates criticize Secure Communities for destroying community confidence in law enforcement and increasing racial profiling. Worse, localities that implement Secure Communities see large numbers of non-criminal immigrants deported, ripping apart families.

The Governor of Massachusetts should know this. Secure Communities has been wreaking havoc on Boston-area families since 2006 when city police first joined the program. The program has resulted in hundreds of deportations, and according to an ACLU analysis of deportations since 2008, more than half of the deportations are of non-criminals. The real effect of Secure Communities has been to sweep up and deport hard-working immigrants for things like traffic violations.

The African Commission on Human and People's Rights suffered a serious bout of amnesia at its meeting in The Gambia last week.  It must have even forgotten its name, because how else could a human rights commission deny that a socially marginalized minority deserves the same protections as other individuals?  That's the essence of human rights, no? That we've all got them?

But the Commission dispatched a two sentence denial of the Coalition of African Lesbians' right to participate in its activities as an observer organization.  Among other things, observer organizations can present the human rights concerns of their constituencies to the commission, thus driving the system of addressing abuses in its member states. But apparently the Commission doesn't feel that lesbians have any human rights concerns.

Lesbians most certainly do suffer rights abuses in Africa. Homosexual activities are criminalized in 36 countries on the continent, including my current home Burundi, and it wasn't too long ago that the Malawian police were hunting down high profile gay folks to send a message.

Sounds like the African Commission on Human and People's Rights forgot that lesbians are human.  And people.  You can help jog the African Commission's memory by writing to commissioners.

Dupont Circle: home to a park smack in the center of a historic neighborhood, this famous Washington, DC landmark is constantly host to meandering lovers, cafe-bound entrepreneurs, stressed out diplomats, think tank people and eager tourists. But last month it was host to something quite different: a drone attack.

Organized by Pax Christi USA, Foreign Policy in Focus, CODEPINK, and Voices for Creative Nonviolence, the mock drone attack was the latest in a series of attempts to bring the wars home for Americans. Similar actions in Madison, San Francisco and Boston resulted in a number of media hits, including the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, energizing the moral dimension of the national conversation about drone attacks in the war on terror.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is going to have a hard week. You should make it harder.

Today, Senate Bill 1070, which modifies Arizona's trespassing laws to criminalize undocumented immigrants, is going to land on the Governor's desk like a ton of bricks. If she signs the bill into law, she will severely compromise public safety, equal protection and the human rights of her constituents. If she vetoes the bill, she might severely compromise her chances of being reelected next year. What's a Republican Governor who was never really elected to do?

SB 1070 directs police to determine the immigration status of non-criminals if there is a 'reasonable suspicion' they are undocumented, dramatically expanding police powers to stop, question and detain individuals for not having proper identification. The proposed law also makes it a state crime to pick up an undocumented day laborer and for migrant workers to solicit work. It expressly forbids communities from adopting “sanctuary” policies that prevent police from carrying out immigration enforcement.

All in all, the law would dramatically increase racially discriminatory policing and increase the immigrant community's distrust of law enforcement.

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Feeling a little sluggish in the springtime?  Move to Phoenix and get yourself incarcerated.  As of this month, a new program in Arizona's Maricopa County jails requires prisoners to pedal a stationary bike to generate, volt-for-volt, the electricity they'll use watching television. It's an hour of biking for an hour of tube. Feel the burn.

Pedal Vision, as the program is called, made news as only the latest in a long string of absurdities and outrages by Joe Arpaio, Sheriff of Maricopa Country. Arpaio runs what human rights activists characterize as the harshest jail system in the United States. Prisoners live in a tent city with little protection against Phoenix's burning hot weather. They are fed only twice a day at a cost of 15 cents a meal. There's no coffee, no salt and pepper, no cigarettes and no organized recreation.

That's not to mention the chain gangs 'staffed' by inmates forced to wear striped suits and pink underwear, or Arpaio's quest to take immigration enforcement into his own hands by targeting neighborhoods and people of color. Abuse of power allegations in that last regard have led the Attorney General's office to launch a "serious and ongoing" probe.

(Yes, that pink underwear link leads to a site where you can purchase your very own pink boxers and handcuffs to support Joe. Please don't.)

To the already impressive list of Reasons for Joe Arpaio's Notoriety, let me add one more: Brazilian prisons.

In Nicaragua, abortion is completely illegal.  It doesn't matter if your pregnancy is the result of a rape or incest.  It doesn't matter if you're nine years old.

It doesn't matter if the baby is unviable, as in cases of ectopic pregnancy, when the fetus implants somewhere outside the womb such as the fallopian tubes, or if it suffers from anencephaly, a neural tube defect in which the fetus fails to develop a brain or skull vault and is born with dramatic physical defects.

It doesn't matter if you're suffering from cancer and your risk of an abortion arises from a need for life-saving chemotherapy.

Or maybe it does.

The story of "Amalia" (known variously to English speaking activists as "Amelia"), a 27-year old pregnant Nicaraguan who was refused treatment for metastatic cancer, says something interesting about the potential effects of international human rights bodies on, well, women's bodies.

Oh no! It turns out that the United States is becoming  Venezuela and nobody noticed .... except the Fox News' editorial page, that is.  Thank heavens for that.

"Could a Chavez style media crackdown be coming our way?" asks Steve Forbes, President and Chief Executive Officer of Forbes and the Editor in Chief of Forbes magazine.  Magic 8 ball says: outlook not so good.

Indeed, here are some other questions that we can ponder with the same level of urgency.  Could Mickey Mouse stub his toe while eating peanuts at the dentist's office?  Could a thousand points of light blind the Loch Ness monster on its day off?

Citing a recent Inter-American Commission of Human Rights report detailing Venezuelan constraints on freedom of expression, Forbes compares Venezuela's use of the punitive power of the state to punish people for their political opinions with, wait for it, the campaign for media reform (and net neutrality) led by the organization Free Press. The two have nothing to do with each other.

Immigrant deaths in detention were a driving force behind pressuring the Obama administration into promising to overhaul the sprawling and inhumane immigrant detention system last August.

While the administration has made some modest steps forward, their strategy lacks one crucial element: accountability.

Take the case of Hiu Lui Ng. Hiu Lui Ng was a Chinese computer engineer detained in Rhode Island. Security cameras caught guards mocking him as he screamed, while they dragged him from his cell.  He was suffering from undiagnosed cancer and a broken spine. He finally got care only through an appeal to a federal judge.

Now Ng's family is seeking to hold the government accountable for his mistreatment. But the government argues that it can't be held liable because it contracted out for Ng's detention.

The left hand doesn't seem to know what the right hand is doing.