And edited version of an essay I wrote in 2017, regarding May 4, 1970.
jimmysrant.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-fo…
The Fourth be with you. The fourth. Star Wars. Fourth of July. Four. Four dead in O-HI-O.

We need to be reminded, constantly, that our own government would order our killings and that uniformed police and soldiers would willingly carry them out.

I was in the 8th grade, in 1970. I lived down the street from MacMurray College, in sleepy Jacksonville, Illinois. Back then, MacMurray was a small but thriving little religiously affiliated liberal arts

The Russian invasion of #Ukraine has squeezed some toothpaste out of the tube that can never be put back in.

The next time some politician wants to outlaw #BDS, regarding the Israeli apartheid in Israel, remind him of the invasion of Lebanon, the bombing of Gaza infrastructure, and the shootings of unarmed #Palestinian protesters.

Apartheid was wrong in South Africa; the boycott was right. The occupation is wrong in Palestine; #BDS is not.

The invasion, bombardment and occupation of Ukraine is wrong. The fastest, most universal, and perhaps most all

@Genproc @RusEmbUSA Zarema Musaeva was abducted on January 20, from her home in Nizhnii Novgorod by men who were later confirmed to be Chechen officials. At least seven men came to her apartment and forcibly took her away under a false pretext that she needed to testify as a witness in a criminal case. A video captured by CCTV cameras has since been published, which shows her being taken into a snowy street wearing no winter coat and no shoes. The men forced her into a car and drove away. On January 21, 2022, Chechen authorities reported that Zarema

@prayutofficial Panusaya “Rung” Sithijirawattanakul is a promising university student, who like many other young people, has been peacefully protesting as part of Thailand’s democracy movement. Over time, this shy amateur violinist has become a protest leader for constitutional and social reform.

Rung was arrested, in March 2021, under a law outlawing criticism of the monarchy. She was imprisoned for 60 days, during which she was diagnosed with COVID19. She was denied bail six times. In defiance, she went on a 38 day hunger strike. She was

@SecBlinken Ciham Ali, a US citizen born in Los Angeles and raised in #Eritrea, has been missing since December 8, 2012. Ciham was arrested at the Sudan border as she tried to flee Eritrea. The teenager, who dreamed of becoming a fashion designer, was 15 at the time. Her arrest appears to be in retaliation against her father’s suspected involvement in a coup attempt on the Eritrean government.

Nine years on, and no one knows where Ciham Ali is being held. #Eritrea is notorious for imprisoning people in underground containers where they where they

@AlsisiOfficial Mohamed Baker is a human rights lawyer. He is in prison for defending some of the most marginalized people in Egypt. In September 2019, he went to the prosecutor’s office to defend his friend and was himself arrested. Authorities never put him on trial. Instead, they made false, terrorism-related accusations against him and threw him in jail – all because they disagreed with his work as head of the Adalah Center for Rights and Freedoms, which supports human rights and those unjustly jailed. Baker was never put on trial. Instead he

@EgyptEmbassyUSA @MotazZahran Hoda Abdelmoniem has been arbitrarily detained for over three years, related to her human rights work. On November 1, 2018, National Security Agency forces broke into her house in Cairo, at 1:30 am, ransacked it, and took her away blindfolded. She was disappeared for three weeks after her arrest until she was brought to the Supreme State Security Prosecution for investigation. After she spent 35 months in pre-trial detention, she was charged with joining, financing, and supporting a “terrorist group” and disseminating

Mikita Zalatarou, a now 17 year-old. Mikita was waiting for a friend on the street in Homel when he was swept into a crowd of protesters on August 10, 2020. The following day – August 11– police officers came to Mikita’s door. They arrested him, beating and accusing him of throwing a Molotov cocktail towards two officers the night before. While holding him in custody, they beat him with an electric shock truncheon. Officers interrogated him without a lawyer or responsible adult present, and locked him up for six months before putting him on trial.

@Iran_UN @TakhtRavanchi Two students, Ali Younesi, aged 21, and Amirhossein Moradi, aged 22, are arbitrarily detained in section 209 of Tehran’s Evin prison. Following their arrest in April 2020, they were held in solitary confinement for 60 days in violation of the absolute prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment. Ali Younesi revealed to his family that he had been denied adequate healthcare for injuries to his left eye sustained during beatings by Military of Intelligence agents and that lights in his cell were turned on 24 hours a day,

@DiazCanelB @EmbaCubaUS @lianystr Hundreds of people remain detained for peacefully protesting in Cuba, including during the mass demonstrations on July 11, 2021. The cases of prisoners of conscience Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, José Daniel Ferrer García, Esteban Rodríguez, and Maykel Castillo Pérez represent only a tiny fraction of the total number of people who are detained solely because of their political, religious, or other beliefs without having used or advocated violence.

All prisoners of conscience must be immediately and unconditionally

@AlsisiOfficialOn @EgyptEmbassyUSA @MotazZahran On September 28, 2021, Patrick George Zaki, a human rights defender and masters student was referred to trial in front of the Emergency State Security Court (ESSC) on the charge of "spreading false news at home and abroad" in connection to an article published in 2019, containing exerpts from his personal diary about the discrimination faced by Coptic Christians in Egypt. He already spent 20 months in unjust pretrial detention pending investigations into charges of "disseminating false news",

@AlsisiOfficial @EgyptEmbassyUSA ; @MotazZahran Ahmed Samir Santawy, started a hunger strike on June 23, 2021 in protest over his unjust conviction by an Emergency State Security Court. He was convicted of publishing “false news to undermine the state, its national interests and public order and spread panic among the people” and sentenced to four years imprisonment on the basis of social media posts, criticizing human rights violations in Egyptian prisons and the state’s mishandling of the pandemic, that he denied writing. Regardless who wrote the

@ChineseEmbinUS @AmbCuiTiankai Rinchen Tsultrim (仁青持真), a Tibetan Monk was sentenced to four years and six months imprisonment in March 2020 without any trial.

Rinchen Tsultrim’s family members only learned about his sentence when the Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture Public Security Bureau informed them in March 2021 that he was in a prison in Chengdu. Rinchen Tsultrim is apparently imprisoned due to his expression of his political views on his WeChat account and personal website. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and

@TakhtRavanchi @Iran_UN Vahid Afkari and Habib Afkari have been repeatedly tortured, following their arrests in 2018. They reported being subjected to severe beatings in Adelabad prison in Shiraz on September 5, 2020 before being placed in solitary confinement cells in apparent retaliation for asking about the fate and whereabouts of their brother Navid Afkari, who had been removed from death row to an unidentified location on September 3; he was executed in secret on September 12, 2020. Since then, they have been held in windowless

@Khaled_Bin_Ali @BahrainEmbDC Husain Abdulrasool Salman Abdulla Husain (16), Sayed Hasan Ameen Jawad Abdulla (16), Faris Husain Habib Ahmed Salman (17) and Mohammed Jaafar Jasim Ali Abdulla (16) – who are being tried as adults before Branch Four of the High Criminal Court, a court specializing in terror-related cases. They stand charged with arson for handling (and using) Molotov cocktails on February 14, 2020 in Karrana, a village north west of Manama. They each face between two and ten years in prison.

On November 30, 2020, the Criminal

@ChineseEmbinUS Human rights defender Yang Maodong, better known by his pen name Guo Feixiong (杨茂东，笔名郭飞雄), has been unreachable since the morning of January 29. He began an indefinite hunger strike at Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport, on January 28, after being prevented from leaving the country to visit his critically ill wife in the United States. When Yang was prevented from leaving the country, he was told that he was under suspicion of “endangering national security”, yet he is currently not known to be under any criminal

@RusEmbUSA @KremlinRussia I am outraged by the attack on the life of Aleksei Navalny and by his subsequent treatment by the Russian government. It would seem the top concern of the prosecutors should be in finding and bringing to justice everyone involved in his poisoning, from whoever took actions to get the poison into his system up to whoever ordered, or approved, the attack. Instead, Mr. Navalny was arrested upon return to his county and sent to prison for two years and eight months for purported “violation of [his] probation terms”.

It seems

@NicolasMaduro @carlosvecchio General Directorate of Military Counter-Intelligence visited the headquarters of Azul Positivo, on 1/12/21. They arrested Johan León Reyes, Yordy Bermúdez, Layners Gutiérrez Díaz, Alejandro Gómez Di Maggio, Miguel Guerra Raydan, and Luis Ferrebuz. Azul Positivo is a non-governmental and humanitarian organization that since 2004 works to promote inclusion, understanding and treatment to HIV+ patients, as well as sexually transmitted infections, diversity and sexual violence.

@TaliaKhattak @shumaisa77 I have read of, and admire your father. I also admire your courage and determination to win his freedom.

I understand that he is an avid reader. He will need to relax when he is released (I have faith!). My favorite book of all is Watership Down. The book I just finished, and enjoyed is The Luminaries.

Again, I look forward to the freedom of your father, IDRIS KHATTAK.

#Write4Rights #W4R2020

@ChefGov_ma @morocco_usa Maati Monjib, is a human rights defender who was arrested December 29, 2020. Security agents in civilian clothes took him by force—and without prior notification— from a restaurant in the capital Rabat to the court of First Instance,

THREAD 1/ where he was brought before the prosecutor. The latter referred him to the investigating judge, who, after interrogating him without a lawyer, ordered his pretrial detention.

@rbalsaud Nassima al-Sada was arrested in July 2018 for her peaceful human rights work. I fear that She has been tortured in jail. She was put in solitary confinement for a year. Even now, her only contact with the outside world is a single weekly phone call. She is denied visits with her family and lawyer. Why doesn't Saudi Arabia present Nassima al-Saud as an example of a 21st century Saudi woman? She is someone to be admired, not persecuted! She has spent her life working to improve women's lives, and seeking the freedom for them to