Human Rights

This is the premier episode of The Sidebar, the weekly podcast from the New America Foundation that looks at what's in and what's underlying the news. This week, host Pamela Chan talks with Tamar Jacoby, Katherine Zoepf and Dan Meredith about Syria, privacy and immigration.

A decade ago, as a bookish schoolgirl in the southern Egyptian city of Sohag, Samira Ibrahim Mohamed was fascinated by Egyptology and yearned to see the antiquities at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo one day.

But when she finally set foot on the grounds of the landmark pink stone building, on March 9, the museum had been turned into a makeshift torture center. Ms. Mohamed, who had just been arrested by the army during a protest on nearby Tahrir Square, was given electric shocks that she said made her body twitch spasmodically for days afterward.

“In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights called for social protection for all in the form of adequate life standards, access to health, education, food, housing, and social security …Despite the six decades of strong economic growth that followed [its] adoption, access to adequate social protection, benefits and services remains a privilege offered to relatively few people.”

On any given morning, Dr. Hawa Abdi wakes at 5 o’clock, ties a cloth over the scar where a brain tumor was removed several years ago, and walks a few hundred feet to the 400-bed hospital she started more than 25 years ago near Mogadishu. Since opening as a one-room clinic, the hospital has grown into a camp for 90,000 displaced Somalis, most of them women and children. They’ve fled to Mama Hawa, as Abdi is called, seeking haven from decades of war and, now, the worst famine in 60 years.

"I'm trembling," my mother says, when I tell her I'm working on an article about how younger and older American Jews are reacting differently to the Palestinians' bid for statehood at the United Nations. I understand the frustrations of the Palestinians dealing with ongoing settlements construction and sympathize with their decision to approach the U.N., but my mom supports President Obama's promise to wield the U.S. veto, sharing his view that a two-state solution can be achieved only through negotiations with Israel.

Agents of the East German Stasi could only have dreamed of the sophisticated electronic equipment that powered Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s extensive spying apparatus, which the Libyan transitional government uncovered earlier this week. The monitoring of text messages, e-mails and online chats — no communications seemed beyond the reach of the eccentric colonel.

The imminent fall of Muammar al-Qaddafi's regime in Libya opens a world of possibilities for Libyans that would have seemed almost impossible a year ago. But scenes of rebels and their civilian supporters celebrating in Tripoli's Green Square and in Qaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound should not obscure the still volatile situation in Libya. Even before Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi's cameo appearance at the Rixos hotel on Aug.

“The Corner of Rothschild and Tahrir,” reads one of the posters at the site where Israel’s summer of social protests began—on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, which has become the movement’s tent-city HQ. Few of the protest leaders would flinch at acknowledging the inspiration they drew from the Arab Awakening, but it is a new, challenging and often uncomfortable feeling for many Jewish Israelis to consider the surrounding Arab world as providing a spark worth emulating.

Sitting before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 9, 2004, Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was taking his time getting to the question that everyone in attendance was waiting for him to answer. "And finally" he said, "there is the matter of whether or not what is happening in Darfur is genocide."

Deprived of food long enough, the bodies of starving people break down muscle tissue to keep vital organs functioning. Diarrhea and skin rashes are common, as are fungal and other infections. As the stomach wastes away, the perception of hunger is reduced and lethargy sets in. Movement becomes immensely painful. Often it is dehydration that finally causes death, because the perception of thirst and a starving person's ability to get water are both radically diminished.