Human rights

Human rights are moral principles or norms, that describe certain standards of human behavior, and are regularly protected as legal rights in municipal and international law. They are commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights "to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being," and which are "inherent in all human beings" regardless of their nation, location, language, religion, ethnic origin or any other status. They are applicable everywhere and at every time in the sense of being universal, and they are egalitarian in the sense of being the same for everyone. They require empathy and the rule of law and impose an obligation on persons to respect the human rights of others. They should not be taken away except as a result of due process based on specific circumstances; for example, human rights may include freedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture, and execution.

International human rights law

International human rights law is the body of international law designed to promote and protect human rights at the international, regional, and domestic levels. As a form of international law, international human rights law is primarily made up of treaties, agreements between states intended to have binding legal effect between the parties that have agreed to them; and customary international law, rules of law derived from the consistent conduct of states acting out of the belief that the law required them to act that way. Other international human rights instruments while not legally binding contribute to the implementation, understanding and development of international human rights law and have been recognised as a source of political obligation.

Enforcement of international human rights law can occur on either a domestic, a regional or an international level. States that ratify human rights treaties commit themselves to respecting those rights and ensuring that their domestic law is compatible with international legislation. When domestic law fails to provide a remedy for human rights abuses, parties may be able to resort to regional or international mechanisms for enforcing human rights.

Amal Clooney

Amal Clooney (née Alamuddin, Arabic: أمل علم الدين‎; born 3 February 1978) is a London-based British-Lebanese lawyer, activist, and author. She is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers, specializing in international law and human rights. Her clients include Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in his fight against extradition. She has also represented the former prime minister of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko, and Canadian-Egyptian journalist Mohamed Fahmy.

Background

Early life and family

Amal was born in Beirut, Lebanon. During the 1980s, when the Lebanese Civil War was in full scale, the Alamuddin family left Lebanon for England and settled in Gerrards Cross. She was two years old at the time. Her father, Ramzi Alamuddin, who received his MBA degree at the American University of Beirut and was the owner of COMET travel agency, returned to Lebanon in 1991. He originally hails from a prominent Lebanese Druze family from the town of Baakline, a village in the Chouf district where many Lebanese Druze live. Her mother, Bariaa Alamuddin (née Miknass), is a foreign editor of the Pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat and a founder of the public relations company International Communication Experts, which is part of a larger company that specializes in celebrity guest bookings, publicity photography, and event promotion. Bariaa is a Sunni Muslim from Tripoli, Lebanon, where a significant community of Lebanese Sunni Muslims live.

Human

Modern humans (Homo sapiens, primarily ssp. Homo sapiens sapiens) are the only extant members of Hominina clade (or human clade), a branch of the taxonomical tribe Hominini belonging to the family of great apes. They are characterized by erect posture and bipedal locomotion, manual dexterity and increased tool use, and a general trend toward larger, more complex brains and societies.

Early hominins—particularly the australopithecines, whose brains and anatomy are in many ways more similar to ancestral non-human apes—are less often referred to as "human" than hominins of the genus Homo. Some of the latter used fire, occupied much of Eurasia, and gave rise to anatomically modern Homo sapiens in Africa about 200,000 years ago. They began to exhibit evidence of behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago, and migrated in successive waves to occupy all but the smallest, driest, and coldest lands.

The spread of humans and their large and increasing population has had a profound impact on large areas of the environment and millions of native species worldwide. Advantages that explain this evolutionary success include a relatively larger brain with a particularly well-developed neocortex, prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes, which enable high levels of abstract reasoning, language, problem solving, sociality, and culture through social learning. Humans use tools to a much higher degree than any other animal, are the only extant species known to build fires and cook their food, and are the only extant species to clothe themselves and create and use numerous other technologies and arts.

NBC Nightly News

NBC Nightly News (titled as NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt for its weeknight broadcasts since June 22, 2015) is the flagship daily evening television news program for NBC News, the news division of the NBC television network in the United States. First aired on August 3, 1970, the program is currently the most watched network newscast in the United States, with an average of 9.3 million viewers, just a few thousand more than its nearest rival, ABC's World News Tonight.NBC Nightly News is produced from Studio 3B at NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Since 2015, the broadcast is anchored by Lester Holt on weeknights, rotating anchors on Saturday and Kate Snow on Sunday. Previous weekday anchors have included David Brinkley, John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, and most recently Brian Williams.

The program is broadcast live over most NBC stations from 6:30 to 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time seven days a week; a special "Western Edition" of the program occasionally features updated information on news stories covered during the original telecast for Pacific Time Zone viewers. Its current theme music, "The Mission" (which debuted in 1985) was composed by John Williams.