Snowden wins Swedish Human Rights award

The famed whistleblower continues to garner international praise even as the US government continues to claim that he is a traitor who must be punished.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden received several standing ovations in the Swedish parliament after being given the Right Livelihood award for his revelations of the scale of state surveillance.

Snowden, who is in exile in Russia, addressed the parliament by video from Moscow. In a symbolic gesture, his family and supporters said no one picked up the award on his behalf in the hope that one day he might be free to travel to Sweden to receive it in person.

His father, Lon, who was in the chamber for what was an emotional ceremony, said: “I am thankful for the support of the Right Livelihood award and the Swedish parliament. The award will remain here in expectation that some time – sooner or later – he will come to Stockholm to accept the award.”
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The awards jury, in its citation, said Snowden was being honoured “for his courage and skill in revealing the unprecedented extent of state surveillance violating basic democratic processes and constitutional rights”.

We love motherhood. We just don’t like the inconvenience.

ProPublica has a review of a case that is being heard by the US Supreme Court today in which a woman driver for UPS was forced to take seven months unpaid leave, losing her health benefits in the process, because she requested that she not be asked to lift weights greater than 20 lbs during her pregnancy, as advised by her doctor, even though her job description requires her to be able to lift 70 lbs. However her normal duties rarely required her to do so and a colleague had said that he was willing to step in when necessary.
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Review: Doc Martin

A colleague recommended this British TV series to me a long time ago but I only got around to watching it over the past long weekend and I was immediately hooked, ending up watching the better part of the first two seasons, about 12 episodes in all. I plan to watch the remaining ones in the days to come. The series began in 2004 and there have been a total of 46 episodes spread over six seasons and the coming season is supposed to be the last one.
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The Christmas season has officially started

I said that I had gotten bored with making fun of the bogus ‘war on Christmas’. How many jokes and snide remarks can you keep making year after year? But I see that American Atheists has not lost its zest for the fray and is not letting the season go by without using it as another way to increase the visibility of atheists in the US and they have unveiled yet another new billboard campaign.
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The role of race in police shootings

The recent deaths of two young black males Michael Brown and Tamir Rice at the hands of white police officers has brought the issue of racism in the police front and center in the national debate. Some of the discussions following my previous posts about the race factor in police shootings centered around whether race played a role in the likelihood of people getting shot, or whether the publicity given to these deaths was presenting a wrong image of the situation, and that anecdotal information was driving a false narrative. In other words, do we really know if, all other things being equal, it is more likely that a black person would be shot by police than white people.
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Peer review in trouble

The peer review system, one of the bedrocks of academic publishing that helps to ensure the quality of research papers, is in trouble. For those not familiar with the system, when a researcher wants to publish the results of their labors, they send the finished manuscript to their journal of choice. The editors in turn have three choices: choose on their own to publish or reject if they feel they have the expertise to judge, or send it out to one or more reviewers who are experts in the same field to obtain their opinion first. The last option is the most common one.
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If he had been black, he might be dead now

The current spate of shootings of black people by white police has raised the issue of whether race is the determining factor. A case can be made that what we have as the ultimate cause of such shootings is a police culture nurtured to have an authoritarian mindset in the service of an increasingly authoritarian state that views poor people as potential threats to law and order, especially at a time of rising inequality.
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