Squee! Tenea D Johnson will be writing a novel for Blindeye books!

Bare (Audio) short story by Tenea Johnson

CURRENT MOOD:ENRAGED

Via:troubleinchina

USA, Canada and the EU attempt to kill treaty to protect blind people's access to written material

Right now, in Geneva, at the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, history is being made. For the first time in WIPO history, the body that creates the world's copyright treaties is attempting to write a copyright treaty dedicated to protecting the interests of copyright users, not just copyright owners.

At issue is a treaty to protect the rights of blind people and people with other disabilities that affect reading (people with dyslexia, people who are paralyzed or lack arms or hands for turning pages), introduced by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay. This should be a slam dunk: who wouldn't want a harmonized system of copyright exceptions that ensure that it's possible for disabled people to get access to the written word?
The USA, that's who. The Obama administration's negotiators have joined with a rogue's gallery of rich country trade representatives to oppose protection for blind people. Other nations and regions opposing the rights of blind people include Canada and the EU.

Update: Also opposing rights for disabled people: Australia, New Zealand, the Vatican and Norway.
Update 2: Countries that are on the right side of this include, "Latin American and Caribbean region including (Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Jamaica) as well as Asia and Africa." Spread the word, tweet, blog, make noise, so that this goes through

PDF:The text of teh Treaty 11 pages

Huffington Post:

The main aim of the treaty is to allow the cross-border import and export of digital copies of books and other copyrighted works in formats that are accessible to persons who are blind, visually impaired, dyslexic or have other reading disabilities, using special devices that present text as refreshable braille, computer generated text to speech, or large type. These works, which are expensive to make, are typically created under national exceptions to copyright law that are specifically written to benefit persons with disabilities.

 

The number of accessible works is very small everywhere, relative to what "sighted" persons can read. However, in developing countries, the collections are super small, and even in the USA, access to works in languages other than English is practically non-existent.

Under the current international legal regime, there is almost no sharing of these works across borders. The treaty would change that, vastly expanding the availability of works to all persons who are blind or have other reading disabilities.

On Sonia Sotomayor from a liberal perspective

We all know that the rightwing is being racist trash. But I'd like to look at Ms. Sotomayor from a liberal perspective. And frankly, I am not pleased. She seems to be a moderate, and the last thing that Supreme Court needs a freaking moderate.


Consider the following links:

Judge Sotomayor's opinion on civil cases

Will Sotomayor disappoint liberals

Will Sotomayor disappoint liberals part 2

A revealing anecdote about Sonia Sotomayor

Obama's Anti-Roberts

Sotomayer on the abortion war

Sotomayor Sides With the Cops: And persuades a Republican judge to go along with her.


Like I said, she's a moderate, who seems to be about to tip the court way too far to the right than I am at all comfortable with.

Some Paul Rosenberg Links

California going to hell in a handbasket: Obama calmly ignoring

Sotomayer, Prop 8 hegemony and the Courts

Pakistan Apocalypse: Don't Believe the Hype!

JUAN COLE: You know, in the past two years, the Pakistani public has demanded an end to a military dictatorship. On the grounds that it was violating the rule of law. They demanded free and fair parliamentary elections. They accomplished them. They voted the largest party they put in is the left of center or centrist secular party. They then went to the streets to demand the reinstatement of the secular civil Supreme Court. And you've had, really, hundreds of thousands of people involved in this movement for the restoration of democracy and the restoration of the rule of law. If this had happened any other place in the world, it would be reported in Washington as a good news story. Here, we've been told that it's a crisis. That it's a sign of instability and nuclear armed nation. I don't understand that.



...

BILL MOYERS: Who are the Taliban and what do they want? What are their goals?

JUAN COLE: What we're calling the Taliban, it's actually a misnomer. There are, like, five different groups that we're swooping up and calling the Taliban. The Taliban, properly speaking, are seminary students. They were those refugee boys, many of them orphans, who went through the seminaries or Madrassas in northern Pakistan back in the nineties. And then who emerged as a fighting force. Then you have the old war lords who had fought with the Soviet Union, and were allied with the United States. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, they have formed insurgent groups to fight the Americans now. Because they had fought the Soviet occupation, they now see an American occupation, so they've turned on the United States. They were former allies.

So we're calling them Taliban. And then you have a lot of probably disorganized villagers whose poppy crops, for instance, were burned. And they're angry. So they'll hit a NATO or American checkpoint. So we're scooping all of this up. And then the groups in northern Pakistan who are yet another group. And we're calling it all Taliban.MORE

Full Interview here

The North-West Frontier Province is 10 percent of the Pakistan population. That's where this stuff is happening. And most of it is actually happening not in the Province itself, but in the Federally Administrated Tribal Regions. Which are kind of like our Indian reservations. Only 3.5 million people live there. It's the size of, like, New Hampshire. Pakistan is a country as big as California, Oregon and Washington rolled up in one, with a population of 165 million. So to take this threat, which is a threat locally, to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas, to parts of the North-West Frontier Province, and to magnify it and to say, "Whoa, the Pakistani government is six months from falling, the Taliban is going to get their hands on nuclear weapons." The kinds of things that are being said in Washington, are just fantastical and some kind of science fiction film. How would these guys, with the Kalashnikov machine guns, take over a country that has an army of 550 thousand? Which has tanks and artillery and fighter jets? How would they even know here the nuclear weapons are? In Pakistan, I just quoted you the Gallup Poll. People don't like Taliban, for the most part.

Obama Nominates Superfund Polluter Lawyer To Run DOJ Environment Division

Let's cut Social Security to pay for banker bailouts!You are about to be hit by another wave of disinformation about how Social Security is going broke and needs reforming (meaning, your benefits must be cut). It's not true.

La Vida Locavore links

Absolutely INFURIATING:How did NAFTA affect Latin America's corn farmers and consumers? Public Radio (I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count)

Behind Latin America's Food Crisis

This bit of corporate thievery is so bloody smart I am almost blown away
One of the most infuriating tidbits is that Silk [soy milk] quietly switched from organic to conventional soy beans without lowering its prices... and then introduced new organic products at a higher price! WTF!

The Food Safety Enhancement Act: Who Does It Affect?

Fresh: The Movie

Infuriating - Factory Shipped Tainted Pistachios Knowingly

So What’s Inside Yoplait Yogurt Anyway? Not good for you!

1862 - 2009: A Brief History of Food and Nutrition Labeling


April 17 was Int'l Day of the Peasant

from the afrogayblog

Who's who in the Black LGBT community




Sabrina Sojourner

Sojourner is the first open lesbian to be elected to the United States Congress. Having been elected by a whopping 83 percent of the vote, Sabrina represented the District of Columbia in the U.S. House of Representatives, where in her non-voting position she lobbied not only for Statehood for the District of Columbia, but impacted other legislators on a whole spectrum of issues. She served from 1997-1999.

Hanifah Walidah

Walidah is a hip-hop artist, playwright, actor, music video maker, and filmmaker. She is a part of the renowned Brooklyn Funk Essentials.

Angela Davis

Angela Davis, an American socialist organizer and professor once associated with the Black Panther Party, first achieved nationwide notoriety when she was linked to the murder of Judge Harold Haley during an attempted prison break. She was a fugitive but was eventually captured, arrested, tried; she was then acquitted in one of the most famous trials in recent history. She is now a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

go see more!

Obama further compromises any principles that he may have had left...

With Pressure Growing over Torture Pics, Obama Turns to Supreme Court to Stop Release

Today, Scott Horton posted a story at The Daily Beast, verifying the authenticity of the British paper's report:

The Daily Beast has obtained specific corroboration of the British account, which appeared in the London Daily Telegraph, from several reliable sources, including a highly credible senior military officer with firsthand knowledge, who provided even more detail about the graphic photographs that have been withheld from the public by the Obama administration.

A senior military officer familiar with the photos told me that they would likely provoke a storm of outrage if released. The well-informed source confirmed, just as reported in the Telegraph, that many of the photographs are sexually explicit, including those mentioned above. The photographs differ from those already officially released.

It took less than a day for the next turn of events. According to a CNN report, the Obama administration has made a motion to recall their request for a hold on the pictures release from the federal appeals court, and will take their request directly to the Supreme Court.

The government said it would proceed "absent intervening legislation" from Congress....
Last week, the Senate voted for the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act, which would limit the reach of the Freedom of Information Act in this instance. The House could adopt a similar provision next month as part of an omnibus spending bill.
The government has until June 9 to file its initial appeal with the Supreme Court.

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