Chronology of Human Rights Violations of the United States in 2015

OCTOBER

Oct. 1

The Guardian reported on its website that observing the current American politics was like watching a game of money. The 2016 presidential election was almost going to be the most expensive one in history.

Oct. 2

The Chicago Tribune and the Huffington Post reported on their websites that on Oct 1, Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer, a student at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, entered a classroom in the college wearing a bullet proof vest and with six guns. He opened fire, killing nine people and wounding nine others, before killing himself. It was the 45th shooting at a school in 2015. There have been 142 shootings at schools since Dec 14, 2012, the date of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Oct. 3

According to the CNN and Sputnik News, a hospital run by aid group Doctors Without Borders in the city of Kunduz in Afghanistan was bombed by the US military on Oct 3, causing 42 deaths, including 12 medical staff and three children. The aid group claimed the airstrike a "war crime" instead of an "error".

Oct. 5

The Washington Post website reported that Omar Ali, an unarmed 27-year-old man, was shot by police in a bar in Akron, Ohio.

Oct. 8

A report by Al Jazeera America said that approximately one-fifth of all US children live in food-insecure households, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture. As of 2014, 15.4 percent of Americans overall reside in food-insecure households, more than 48 million people in total.

Oct. 10

The USA Today website reported that, the gap between the rich and poor in the United States jumped dramatically in the 1980s, making upward mobility increasingly difficult for low-income Americans. In the United States, 3.1 percent of income earned annually went to the poorest 20 percent of people, while 51.4 percent was earned by the richest 20 percent. Statistics showed that over half of all wealth in the United States belonged to the top 3 percent of earners.

On the same day, the BBC and the RT America reported that gunfire broke out on Oct 9 on the Northern Arizona University and Texas Southern University campuses. With the two shootings on college campuses, the number of U.S. school shootings in 2015 climbed to 52, with 30 people killed and 53 others injured.

Oct. 14

An AFP report showed that New York was a city of extreme inequality, where people in the poor neighborhood of Brooklyn died 11 years earlier than those living around Wall Street, according to data released on Oct 14.

Oct. 15

According to a report on the Daily Mail website, when carrying out drone assassinations, the US military used "phone data alone"－a limited way of guaranteeing a kill.

During Operation Haymaker, a campaign in northeastern Afghanistan which ran between January 2012 and February 2013, some 219 people were killed by drones but just 35, 15 percent, were the intended targets. During another five-month stretch of the operation, a staggering 90 percent of those killed were not the intended target. Despite this all the deaths were labeled EKIA, or "enemy killed in action".

Oct. 22

The AOL website reported that protests were held in many major cities and towns across the United States on Oct 22 to stop police brutality. The event's organizer posted five shocking facts about police brutality in the United States on its website: 1. More than 920 people have been killed by the police in 2015; 2. Black Americans are more than twice likely to be unarmed when killed during police encounters than whites; 3. Native Americans are just as likely as blacks to be killed by law enforcement officers; 4. Excessive force is one of the most common forms of police misconduct; 5. For every 1,000 people killed by police, only one officer is convicted of a crime.

Oct. 23

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Amir Meshal couldn't sue the FBI for illegally detaining, interrogating and torturing him abroad for four months. Meshal claimed FBI agents held him without process or access to counsel, put him in solitary confinement, and threatened him with torture and death, and returned him to the United States after multiple transfers to squalid jails in several countries.

On the same day, the Christian Science Monitor reported on its website that the American Chamber of Commerce, the biggest commercial lobbying group in the nation, planned to play an active role in the 2016 presidential election. The chamber said it would spend $100 million in 2016 presidential election, compared with 70 million in 2014.

Oct. 31

According to information provided by the Coalition for the Homeless, in recent years, homelessness in New York City had reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In October 2015, there were 59,568 homeless people, including 14,361 homeless families with 23,858 homeless children, sleeping each night in the New York City municipal shelter system. The number of homeless New Yorkers sleeping each night in municipal shelters was 86 percent higher than it was ten years ago. Each night thousands of unsheltered homeless people slept on New York City streets, in the subway system, and in other public spaces.