Cellar Door’s Weekly Roundup
No one came to Suvarna’s rescue. We were the only three women who saw the entire honour killing. “There were around 10 men, including her father beating her and finally hanging her to death. The entire village watched silently,” recalled 70-year-old Tholasamma, Govindaraju’s mother and his sister-in-law Thayamma.
Tholasamma and her two daughters-in-law, Thayamma and Mangala Gowri, are the main eye witnesses to the honour killing.
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Thousands ‘forcibly relocated’ in Ethiopia, says HRW report
Human Rights Watch says people in the remote western Gambella region of Ethiopia are being moved to inadequate villages to free up land for commercial agriculture
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I don’t trust Forbes to tell this story. Just for the record.
India Factory Workers Revolt, Kill Company President
Workers at the Regency Ceramics factory in India raided the home of their boss, and beat him senseless with lead pipes after a wage dispute turned ugly.
The workers were enraged enough to kill Regency’s president K. C. Chandrashekhar after their union leader, M. Murali Mohan, was killed by baton-wielding riot police on Thursday.
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An excellent pulling apart of Sam Childers from the movie, Machine Gun Preacher
Regardless of the corrections and additions I’ve noted here, I think it obviously stands that you shouldn’t give Childers your money. Childers has been promoting himself as just the hero the children of South Sudan need, and is finally getting a movie based on his life. For the full list of dubious claims (which were not limited to working with the SPLA) see my prior posts, but it’s worth noting again that he’s stockpiling arms at his orphanage and has admitted to selling weapons to unnamed armed factions in Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda. He’s apparently fighting with or is friends with the SPLA or some faction of it (details are unclear). His organization doesn’t seem up-front enough about what they have done and will continue to do with your donation to deserve it. And now (according to comments here) he may be poised to start raising money for famine relief in Somalia.
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Nice breakdown of why Nick Kristof makes my skin crawl.
It’s worth noting here that Kristof publishes photos and names of his victims, indicating that he does not see them as part of the same discourse and hence is free to treat them as objects. This is consistent with a larger point: In Kristof, the victim is wholly constructed and constituted by violence, or more specifically, violence that can be turned into narrative. She (and it’s usually a she) literally doesn’t exist until violence is done to her body and Kristof reports on it; she ceases to exist when violence is cleansed away through the savior’s ritual act. The victim does not continue on and face ordinary problems such as impoverishment or limited access to health care. She has served her purpose, and Kristof is off to report on the next mass rape. So he can use her name and photograph—she doesn’t exist afterward anyway.
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CNIC woes: For transgenders, their guru is their guardian
PESHAWAR: For the transgender community in Peshawar, a government form that asks them to identify themselves as part of a family that shirked them is unacceptable.
And so they are demanding that their computerised national identity cards, which not only allow them to access their basic rights but also enfranchise them as citizens of Pakistan, include the names of their respective gurus in place of a father.
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Transgender rights activists from different parts of India speak candidly about their life, love and relationships.
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A shocking video surfaced last week of a TV show in which a morning show host went around in parks catching boys and girls hanging out alone (probably dating discreetly and understandably so) in parks. It caused appropriate outrage, petitions were filed, open letters were written, parodies were made. Maya Khan got fired from Samaa. Fantastic.This sort of activism in Pakistan gives even the worst of cynics hope. […]
In a particularly fucked up series, this man goes around installing cameras in people’s rooms to catch them in the middle of homosexual activity (I’m cringing and shaking with anger even as I type this) on the behest of their parents. These good upstanding folks team up with the poor family worried about their kid to harass, insult, demonize and physically assault boys and girls who are caught confessing their attraction for the same sex.
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Brown Grrlz Project Awesome.
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Also awesome.
“Room 237,” the first full-length documentary by the director Rodney Ascher, examines several of the most intriguing of these theories. It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.
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Rivers in the desert look like trees. Very cool.
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Is your relationship suffocating you? Pun-intended. Photos of Vacuum-Packed Couples.
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Vampire-themed Feminine Napkins Oy.
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And…Hmmm..
Cellar Door 