Tag: Amnesty International

Pussy Riot in an unauthorized offensive show at the US Federal Reserve?

Before the make-over
Before the unusually expensive make-over

Is the American Federal Government into concert promotion?

Two members of the unusually lame Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot, who seem to have a unusually strong media promotion team behind them, were recently released from prison and will appear at an Amnesty International concert in Brooklyn February 5th, WNYC reports.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina are scheduled to appear during the Bringing Human Rights Home concert at the Barclays Center in New York.

It is not certain which human right they had wished to defend when they were caught trespassing in a church in Moscow. The whole episode has an air of being manufactured, as if they might appear alongside the US Federal Turds next.

Musically it is hard to understand their large global following, but politically less so.

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were released from prison last month after serving 21 months for hooliganism after a March 2012 arrest for giving an unauthorized offensive performance in Christ The Savior Cathedral.

It is not known whether they might do an unauthorized offensive performance in front of the Federal Reserve.

Amnesty International urges Gambia to stop mass executions

Amnesty International on Tuesday said it was appalled at the execution in Gambia of nine death row prisoners by firing squad and urged government not to kill an estimated 38 prisoners remaining.

“We are appalled that the Gambian authorities carried out the nine executions and urge them to ensure that no further executions take place,” said Paule Rigaud, Amnesty International’s deputy director for Africa.

Gambia’s interior ministry said Monday nine death row prisoners including a woman had been executed by firing squad on Sunday night, a week after President Yahya Jammeh vowed to carry out all death sentences by mid-September.

The president’s feared plain-clothed security officers could be seen on the streets of the capital Banjul Tuesday, and tension was palpable among citizens who are afraid to talk about the executions lest their words be recorded by Jammeh’s agents and punished.

In a televised address to mark this year’s Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr Jammeh said: “By the middle of next month, all the death sentences will have been carried out to the letter.

“There is no way my government will allow 99 percent of the population to be held to ransom by criminals.”

Jammeh, a former military officer who seized power in a 1994 coup, rules the tiniest nation on the African mainland with an iron fist and brooks no dissent.

The regime of the man who claims he can cure AIDS is often pilloried for human rights abuses, enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings, torture and the muzzling of journalists.

In November 2011, Jammeh won a fourth term in power, brought to power by an electorate who the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) said was “cowed by repression and intimidation.”

While the last official execution took place in 1985, AFP’s correspondent in Banjul said that executions in Gambia, a sliver of land wedged into Senegal, have continued unofficially with the most recent before Sunday’s death squad firing taking place in 2007.

Amnesty International had considered Gambia to be among the 22 of Africa’s 54 states which are abolitionist in practice. Sixteen are abolitionist in law for all crimes.