Headlines for Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Former Argentine dictator sentenced to life for human rights violations
In a landmark human rights trial, a court in Argentina today sentenced the country’s most recent dictator to 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity.  FSRN’s Marie Trigona reports from Buenos Aries.

In the early 1980s, Reynaldo Bignone served as Argentina’s final dictator.  Prosecutors charged him with 52 counts of torture and illegal kidnapping committed at the Campo de Mayo clandestine detention center in the suburbs of Buenos Aires.

As the court deliberated, pro-dictatorship groups rallied in front of the Supreme Court, calling for amnesty for military, police and civilians being prosecuted in over two dozen trials currently underway.

But rights groups also marched, demanding that authorities investigate the murder of Silvia Suppo, a key witness in one of the trials.  She was killed at the end of March.
Human rights groups are still seeking information as to the whereabouts of the 30,000 people who were disappeared during the nation’s bloody military dictatorship.  Marie Trigona, FSRN, Buenos Aires.

TX Attorney General challenges gay divorce
The Attorney General of Texas is appealing the decisions of two family court judges who granted divorces to same sex couples.  Both couples, one from Dallas and the other in Austin, were legally married in Massachusetts, according to the Associated Press.  Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott says he’s defending “the traditional definition of marriage that was approved by Texas voters.”  Same sex marriage was banned in the state in 2005.  Tomorrow the Dallas couple will appear in appeals court.

PA school district takes 56,000 pictures of students with computer spy cams
Two months ago, parents of a student from the Lower Merion School District in the Philadelphia suburbs filed a class action lawsuit after they discovered the webcam on a school-issued laptop took pictures of their son Blake at home.  The Robbins family alleges the school invaded their son’s privacy.  And now, thousands of images of other students have surfaced.  From Philadelphia, FSRN’s Matthew Petrillo reports.

District investigators say remotely activated webcams on school-issued laptops snapped nearly fifty-six thousand pictures of students while they were at home.  The laptops also recorded screenshots of their computer monitors.

Mark Haltzman represents the Robbins family:

“That number, 56,000, is only what they've been able to recover.  We know that there are many, many more pictures that they haven't been able to recover, or say that they haven't been able to recover.”

District officials contend they weren’t spying, and only turned on the spy-cam software after a student reported a missing laptop.  The software supposedly deletes the images after the program is turned off.  But on a handful of occasions, according the investigation, the spy-program was never deactivated and kept shooting pictures for months.  Matthew Petrillo, FSRN, Philadelphia.

Civil Rights matriarch dies at 98
And finally, today the United States says goodbye to civil rights pioneer Dr. Dorothy Height.  She died of natural causes in a Washington, DC hospital.  She was 98 years old.  Height served as the President of the National Council for Negro Women for more than 40 years, and in that time was a staunch advocate for civil rights, fighting to end segregation and training women to be community advocates.  Height says by the age of 25 she had already shaped her life’s work.  She was pushed hard by her parents, church and teachers.

“They would talk to us about taking responsibility.  You know, standing up on your own, standing up for what you believe in.  That to me was the heart of it, helping me to see that you had to have your own convictions… that you were not just following along what other people do.  And I think that one of the things that we can do today is to take more time with our young people.  And to take some time with helping them understand that they have a potential.  It may not always be the same or the same kind, but whatever it is they can be… that they want to be… They can do a lot, if they can just get that sense.”

Audio courtesy of the University of Virginia.  Early in her career, Height was selected as one of 10 young people to help Eleanor Roosevelt plan the World Youth Conference.  She also worked with Mary McLeod Bethune, Martin Luther King and numerous other black leaders