Two young architects are taking a novel approach to housing in one Indian slum: They’re working with the community to improve its houses gradually and organically, based on design input and support from the people who live there.

This may not sound radical, but it is, reports Canadian architecture and design magazine Azure (article not available online). The magazine spotlights Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson, whose incremental housing strategy is quite a departure from most slum “improvement” projects. “Upgrading a slum usually means tearing everything down and building housing blocks,” Göransson told Azure. “We wanted to improve their living conditions and allow them to keep their neighbors and social networks.”

Göransson and Balestra are working with architects and nonprofits in India to roll out the project in Netaji Nagar, a neighborhood within a large inner-city slum in the city of Pune. After a series of community workshops (pictured below), they settled on three different house prototypes, all of which are easy for families to expand or change in the future. One of the prototypes leaves a “void” on the ground floor, so that the space can be easily used as a shop, to house livestock, or store a rickshaw.

Construction is scheduled to begin after the monsoon season, probably sometime in September. Read all about the project on Göransson and Balestra’s website, which houses tons of fascinating details and beautiful photos, illustrations, and maps.

“The poor really need architecture, but they cannot pay,” Balestra told Azure. “We want to contribute.”

Source: Azure

Image courtesy of Filipe Balestra.

The detention, torture, and murder of lesbian, gay, and transgendered people in Iraq is the subject of a Human Rights Watch report released this week. We've reported on the slow response of the human rights community to sexual cleansing in Iraq, and we've reported on the brutal torture techniques captured on video and distributed via cell phone as a warning to members of what some iraqis call the "third sex." The Human Rights Watch Report, They Want Us Exterminated: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq, contains several terrible survivor stories and implicates the militias, political, cultural, and religious leaders, and the Iraqi government in no uncertain terms.

The horrors detailed in the report are numbing. Here is an excerpt from the testimony of a man we only know as "Nuri":

I was in a taxi in the middle of Karada when special police stopped the car, asked me for my ID, and searched me. They took my phone and my wallet, and handcuffed me. They put a bag over my head, hit me and put me in a car. They took me to the Ministry of Interior.

They put me in a room, a regular room, took the bag off my head, and there I was with five other gay men.

…They separated us and put each in a room … a police officer came and said. "Do you know where you are? You are in the interrogation wing of the Ministry of Interior." He told me, "If you have ten thousand US dollars, we will let you go." 

I said I didn't have that kind of money.

The next day at 10 a.m., they cuffed my hands behind my back. Then they tied a rope around my legs, and they hung me upside down from a hook in the ceiling, from morning till sunset. I passed out. I was stripped down to my underwear while I hung upside down. They cut me down that night, but they gave me no water or food.

Next day, they told me to put my clothes back on and they took me to the investigating officer. He said, "You like that? We're going to do that to you more and more, until you confess." Confess to what? I asked. "To the work you do, to the organization you belong to, and that you are a tanta" [queen].

"They knew the name 'Iraqi LGBT'-and they knew it helped mithliyeen [homosexuals] financially. They knew about the safe houses. All they wanted to know was, 'Who's paying? And why are they helping you?'"

When I was questioned, they said, "You have to confess." And I said, I have nothing to confess. Then they showed me a police report. I read it and it showed everything about me from 2005 until the day I was arrested. ... They knew personal details, through gay informants. And then they took me into another room, and began torturing me again.

One day, they took me up to the top floor, where there was a little window, straight onto the courtyard. They gave me binoculars to look. I could see:  there were the five men from the cell when I was first arrested. They were lying dead. They'd been executed.

Source: Human Rights Watch

Image by Stephanie Glaros. 

In 1996, shortly after Burmese democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi was released from her house arrest she met with a visiting journalist and told him: “I'm afraid that countries and events keep slipping from the headlines, and we have slipped.”

Suu Kyi’s freedom would be short-lived, and today Burma and Aung San Suu Kyi are in the headlines. The European Union is broadening its sanctions against the murderous Burmese regime, and this weekend, as the Obama administration mulls its response to yet another house arrest sentence for Suu Kyi, U.S. Senator Jim Webb will become the first senior U.S. official to meet with Burma’s leadership. Ever.

Burma’s constant media blackout, enforced by the regime, makes keeping up with current events in Burma is difficult enough. Learning its history is another thing altogether. John Pilger attempted to write some of the unwritten history of Burma in 1996, and we reprinted his dispatch from the country in the pages of Utne Reader. It’s a history of inspiring grassroots action and terrible government violence. Here’s Pilger recounting the dramatic events that led to Suu Kyi’s first house arrest:

Few outside Burma know about the epic events that took place here between 1988 and 1990. Few have heard of the White Bridge on Inya Lake in the center of Rangoon, now known to foreign businesspeople as the site of an "international business center." Yet it was here that an uprising as momentous as the storming of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was sparked. On March 18, 1988, hundreds of schoolchildren and students marched along the bridge, singing the national anthem, signaling that they wanted no more of the authoritarian rule that had been in place since a 1962 military coup. The march was as joyful as it was defiant. When suddenly they saw behind them the steel helmets of the Lon Htein, the "riot police," they knew they were trapped.

According to eyewitnesses I have interviewed in exile, the soldiers systematically beat many of the protesters to death, singling out the girls. A few protesters managed to escape into the lake, where they were caught, beaten, and drowned. Of those who survived, 42 were locked in a waiting van parked in the noonday sun outside Insein prison, where they died of suffocation. At the White Bridge fire engines were brought in to wash away the blood.

This state-sanctioned violence did not put an end to the protests. On the contrary: After months of rising popular confidence, the moment of general uprising came precisely at eight minutes past eight on the morning of the eighth day of the eighth month of 1988. This was the auspicious time the dockers chose to go on strike, and the country followed: teachers, journalists, railway workers, weather forecasters, grave diggers, even prison warders and police. The massive demonstration, soon joined by students, numbered more than 10,000 protesters.

When Ne Win, the now-retired chairman of the ruling junta, kept his promise to "shoot to kill those who stand against us," there were no television comeras linked to satellite dishes, as there were during China's bloody response to the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square the following year. Over the next four days several thousand Burmese died in the streets and in the prisons, under torture, and even in their homes as the army stormed the crooked lanes, firing at random into flimsy homes. Anyone with a camera was a target. Perhaps the world really took notice only when a charismatic woman, Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of the national hero Aung San, was placed under house arrest in July 1989. Thereafter, so the junta calculated, they could proceed with an election that, without her, they were certain to win and that would legitimize their dictatorship. In fact, they lost spectacularly: Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won 82 percent of the parliamentary seats; she even swept the board in principal army cantonments.

Shocked, the generals (who had renamed the regime the State Law and Order Restoration Council, known by its Orwellian moniker SLORC) threw most of the newly elected Parliament into prison and turned Burma into what Amnesty International has described as "a prison without walls." Since then, year upon year, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has translated Burma's tyranny into the following catalog: "Torture, summary and arbitrary executions, forced labor, abuse of women, politically motivated arrests and detention, forced displacement, important restrictions on the freedoms of expression and association, and oppression of ethnic and religious minorities."

Read the rest of Pilger’s dispatch, Burma: Slave Nation.

The Hartford Advocate wants to know: What happened to New Haven, Connecticut’s 800 missing high school students? Four years ago, the city enrolled a freshman class of 1,796—this past June, only about 1,000 graduated. The state can’t fully explain the disparity because it doesn’t yet have a system in place to track students during their educational careers; if you drop out, you disappear.

Better student tracking is coming next year, but the stats nonetheless put an “antiquated formula” for calculating high school graduation rates in stark relief. If all of the missing students dropped out, then New Haven’s 2009 graduation rate is about 55 percent, reports the Advocate. That’s “a far cry from the mid-70s New Haven has been reporting to the state for the past few years.”

But this isn’t just Connecticut’s problem. Four years ago, all 50 states made a pact to update how they measure graduation rates—the new system requires counting 9th-graders and keeping tabs on how many earn diplomas. Only a third have made good on the pledge. Connecticut is not one of them: It currently counts students who spend more than four years completing high school or earn their GED, but doesn’t account for students who drop out or leave for another school without giving official notice. “In other words,” the Advocate writes, “it’s not very accurate.”

And the truth can hurt: Hartford, Connecticut schools began voluntarily crunching pact-compliant numbers in 2007, which resulted in publishing a 29 percent graduation rate. That same year, the state’s method of educational accounting came up with 77 percent. Connecticut has promised to get up to speed by 2010.

Source: Hartford Advocate

Image by Werwin15, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Dallas City Council thinks it has a strategy for ending homelessness in the city, and it's fabulously uncomplicated: housing for the homeless. Not shelters, but actual apartments. Next American City reports:

According to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, it costs more to maintain someone in homelessness than to offer permanent shelter. The group's study of 65 cities found that support services like hospitals, courts and police intervention cost between $35,000 and $150,000 per person per year. Providing housing runs between $13,000 and $25,000.

So Dallas has approved "a multimillion-dollar plan to provide 700 housing units over five years as permanent shelters throughout the city for the homelessness." The price tag for the plan could be as high as $18 million.

A recent study focusing soley on medical care for the homeless found hospitals that reach out to help homeless people before they pass through emergency room doors can save hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

There's a pattern here. All roads lead to giving a damn.

Source: Next American City (Article not available online)

Image by Franco Folini, licensed under Creative Commons . 

How does a country even begin to address the wrongs of genocide? That is the task facing The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), as it tries Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, the first former member of the Khmer Rouge to answer for the killings of untold numbers of people during the regime’s reign. For many in the West, war crimes tribunals are a symbol of international justice. But in the March issue of Harper’s, Ben Ehrenreich illuminates just how complicated, and unresolved, this process can be.

The Cambodian truth and reconciliation process has been mired in international politics and complicated by a frustrating lack of information, according to Ehrenich. “The debate over what occurred and what it means often has more to do with Western ideological divides than with anything that could optimistically be called truth,” he writes, citing the vast differences in official death tolls as an example. The United States backed the Khmer Rouge during the cold war, so Ehrenich writes: “Ultimately, the number of deaths you want to attribute to the Khmer Rouge depends on how many deaths you are comfortable pinning on the United States.”  

The apparent ambivalence of the Cambodian people toward the tribunals presents another problem, according to Ehrenreich : “No Cambodians I met, however, expressed the faith so uniformly voiced in the West: that trying the surviving Khmer Rouge leadership represents the country’s ‘last chance’ for justice, and that prosecuting four old men and one old woman could being to settle history’s debts.”

Source: Harper’s (Subscription Required)

Yesterday, the Utah legislature killed the last of the bills proposed as part of the Common Ground Initiative, which sought to extend civil rights to same-sex couples, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. HB160 would have granted same-sex couples inheritance rights and the power to make medical decisions for one another. Other bills in the package would have expanded health care coverage, offered employment safeguards, and amended a resolution banning gay marriage to allow civil unions.

Despite the defeat, Equality Utah, the LGBT advocacy group which drafted the initiative, has resolved to reintroduce the bills again. “We are not giving up on these issues,” said executive director Mike Thompson. “The Common Ground Initiative is not a 2009 legislative agenda.” And they have some reason for hope: Public opinion has favored expanded rights for same-sex couples, and last week Daily Herald reported that conservative Governor Jon Huntsman announced support for Common Ground’s aims.

(Thanks, Religion Dispatches.)

Sources: Daily Herald, EqualityUtah.com, Religion Dispatches, Salt Lake Tribune 

In the month following the Oscar Grant shooting on the Bay Area Rapid Transit, the Oakland police force has come under intense national scrutiny. There’s reason to believe the attention will continue: According to the Oakland Tribune, the FBI recently launched investigations into an alleged police cover-up of another civilian death back in 2000. Capt. Edward Poulson is accused of beating Jerry Amaro III, who later died of his injuries, and directing other officers to lie about it. Though the department conducted its own internal investigation into the matter, it resulted in only a brief suspension for Poulson, who not only kept his job but was later promoted to head of Internal Affairs. The Center for Investigative Reporting notes that the case is being revisited as part of a larger FBI inquiry into problems on the force, including accusations of sexual harassment and a scandal over falsified search warrants.  

(Thanks, Colorlines.)

This summer, Michigan State University sparked a heated discussion when they proposed shortening their fall 2009 semester. Student government and University Committee on Student Affairs member Kara Spencer condemned the idea by writing a personal response to the proposal and emailing it to 391 faculty members. According to the university’s bulk email policy, Spencer had violated their anti-spam guidelines and would have to undergo formal investigation.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education took on the case, arguing that Spencer was exercising her right to free speech. The emails were not inherently disruptive, they claimed, and should not fall into the category of spam. FIRE’s letter to MSU officials called their actions a “threat to free expression” and “legally and morally unacceptable.”

More than three months after the initial incident, Spencer was found guilty by the Student-Faculty Judiciary, who placed a formal warning in her student file.

“MSU's decision defies the First Amendment, fairness, and common sense,” according to Adam Kissel, Director of FIRE's Individual Rights Defense Program. “MSU is effectively preventing the campus community from sending e-mails criticizing the administration to more than an extremely small fraction of the MSU community. The university should be ashamed, and the president should immediately overturn this illiberal finding.”

(Thanks, CNet)

Catholics are no strangers to schisms, but breaking secular ties is proving tricky, reports the Catholic newsweekly America (subscription required). When Amnesty International announced its policy supporting the worldwide decriminalization of abortion in August 2007, affiliated Catholic chapters had to decide whether the nonprofit’s work against torture and the death penalty outweighed its stance on abortion.

Unsurprisingly,  America found that many Catholic chapters disaffiliated from Amnesty International. “It’s disappointing,” says Monsignor Robert McClory, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Detroit. “On particular cases, we can work together. But the kind of in-depth collaborative work of the past would be stifled by the decision they’ve taken.”

In spite of the controversial policy, some social justice–minded Catholics are finding it difficult to abandon Amnesty International's work completely. Notre Dame’s campus chapter changed its name to “Human Rights Notre Dame” but continues to rely on information from Amnesty’s “Urgent Action” alerts. Across the Atlantic, the predominantly Catholic Amnesty Northern Ireland has struggled with breaking ties, reports Ireland’s public service broadcaster RTÉ, and is considering letting Catholic schools re-join Amnesty International if they can be sure funds raised won’t help support abortion. 

Catholic human rights groups may continue to seek new affiliations. America speculates that some may look to abortion-neutral human rights organizations such as the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

Image by Takoma Bibelot, licensed under Creative Commons.

It’s an unrelentingly grim global forecast for activists and protestors worn down by decades of recurring injustices. But thanks to the human rights website New Tactics, activists needn’t rely on stale techniques to create change. Coordinated by the Minneapolis-based Center for Victims of Torture, New Tactics helps human rights defenders share stories of successful strategies, like text messaging to stop torture, an action by the human rights group Amnesty Netherlands that mobilized thousands of young people to demand the release of an imprisoned journalist in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Activists can also discuss how successful techniques can work in other countries and communities.

Starting June 25, New Tactics members will discuss the use of video in human rights advocacy, which, incidentally, was the subject of a recent Utne Reader story on creating participatory video to combat gender-based violence.

Also check out Utne.com's new special project, "Tracking Torture Coverage," a regularly updated roundup of the best torture coverage from around the globe.

Where are the worst countries to be a woman? Haiti, Yemen, Sierra Leone, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, and Moldova. That's according to Foreign Policy, which put together this regionally organized roster of shame by culling information from the United Nations Human Development Report. Highlighted indicators of women’s standing include national political representation, female-to-male income ratio, and the female literacy rate. The magazine offers short profiles of the inequality facing women in each of these countries, and in each women’s sexual and reproductive health comes to the forefront, whether the issue is rape, HIV infection, maternal health, or human trafficking. 

Reading these depressing descriptions as the dates of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions loom presents an opportunity to act. The reproductive health site RH Reality Check is examining how to prioritize women’s health in party platforms. This afternoon at 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. EST, discuss global women’s health in U.S. policy at RH Reality Check with Anika Rahman, President of Americans for UNFPA. (If you miss the conversation, you can still read the exchange in the comments section of the article.) 

Image by Humanitarian and Development Partnership Team in the Central African Republic, licensed under Creative Commons.

Community organizing requires people believing they belong to a cohesive community. It seems obvious, but consider the particular challenges facing African Americans and Latino immigrants, who struggle with ingrained antagonisms, reports the Kirwan Institute Update (pdf), a publication of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. They compete “for the same low-paying jobs in many areas, especially in the South,” according to the report, and employers economically exploiting undocumented immigrant workers corrode the unionizing attempts of African Americans. Yet uniting African Americans and Latino immigrants “might be the key to counteract the rising nativistic ideologies and to fight against the pervasive structural racism both communities face.” 

To ease the tension between African Americans and Latinos, the Kirwan Institute has several suggestions. Besides the obvious tactics of emphasizing common concerns and working in common spaces like schools and multiracial churches, it suggests involving community “bridge-builders.” These individuals might be African immigrants, Black Latinos, or immigrant children—people who can remind the community of the blurry boundaries between the two groups. 

Image by Claudia A. De La Garza, licensed under Creative Commons.

“I’m drawn to bad news like a moth to a summer porch light” confesses editor Kristyn Komarnicki in the November/December issue of the evangelical Christian magazine Prism. Komarnicki’s confession seems like dreary reading, but her unflinching interest in bad news is tempered by a faith “in God’s power to… transform us through every drop and sliver of anguish that life can hand out.” 

The news that fills Prism’s columns isn’t easy reading: mountains are being destroyed for coal mining, Americans are over-worked and still poor, and teens are getting into abusive relationships—at church. Behind the doom and gloom, however, the magazine’s evangelical message points toward concrete solutions. No matter how audacious the challenge, evangelical Christians are willing to fight, buoyed by a faith that lives and struggles have meaning. You don’t need to be an evangelical, or even a Christian, to appreciate Prism’s strong message of action. Even staunch atheists may be able to find inspiration in the magazine’s motivating message .

—Brendan Mackie