'She is considered disobedient'

Afghanistan passes 'barbaric' law diminishing women's rights

Rehashed legislation allows husbands to deny wives food if they fail to obey sexual demands

The Guardian: Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands' sexual demands, despite international outrage over an earlier version of the legislation which President Hamid Karzai had promised to review.

The new final draft of the legislation also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. 'It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying 'blood money' to a girl who was injured when he raped her,' the US charity Human Rights Watch said...

Islamic law experts and human rights activists say that although the language of the original law has been changed, many of the provisions that alarmed women's rights groups remain, including this one: "Tamkeen is the readiness of the wife to submit to her husband's reasonable sexual enjoyment, and her prohibition from going out of the house, except in extreme circumstances, without her husband's permission. If any of the above provisions are not followed by the wife she is considered disobedient.'...

Human Rights Watch, which has obtained a copy of the final law, called on all candidates to pledge to repeal the law, which is says contradicts Afghanistan's own constitution. The group said that Karzai had 'made an unthinkable deal to sell Afghan women out in the support of fundamentalists in the August 20 election.'

Image source here.

Antarctic melting 'unprecedented'

Antarctic glacier 'thinning fast'

One of the largest glaciers in Antarctica is thinning four times faster than it was 10 years ago.

BBC: A study of satellite measurements of Pine Island glacier in west Antarctica reveals the surface of the ice is now dropping at a rate of up to 16m a year. Since 1994, the glacier has lowered by as much as 90m, which has serious implications for sea-level rise... Calculations based on the rate of melting 15 years ago had suggested the glacier would last for 600 years. But the new data points to a lifespan for the vast ice stream of only another 100 years. The rate of loss is fastest in the centre of the glacier and the concern is that if the process continues, the glacier may break up and start to affect the ice sheet further inland.

One of the authors, Professor Andrew Shepherd of Leeds University, said that the melting from the centre of the glacier would add about 3cm to global sea level. 'But the ice trapped behind it is about 20-30cm of sea level rise and as soon as we destabilise or remove the middle of the glacier we don't really know what's going to happen to the ice behind it... This is unprecedented in this area of Antarctica. We've known that it's been out of balance for some time, but nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.'...

This comes as scientists in the Arctic are finding evidence of dramatic change. Researchers on board a Greenpeace vessel have been studying the northwestern part of Greenland. One of those taking part, Professor Jason Box of Ohio State University, has been surprised by how little sea ice they encountered in the Nares Strait between Greenland and Canada. He has also set up time lapse cameras to monitor the massive Petermann glacier. Huge new cracks have been observed and it's expected that a major part of it could break off imminently.

Professor Box told BBC News: 'The science community has been surprised by how sensitive these large glaciers are to climate warming. First it was the glaciers in south Greenland and now as we move further north in Greenland we find retreat at major glaciers. It's like removing a cork from a bottle.'

Image from quoted article.

A Journey into Time Immemorial

'Ancient' website looking at Fraser Valley touted world's best e-content

Vancouver Sun: A Simon Fraser University-designed website that portrays the Fraser Valley as it was hundreds of years ago has emerged ahead of 20,000 other e-projects from around the globe to win the World Summit Award, the United Nations-based contest for e-content and creativity.

A Journey into Time Immemorial, which is based on First Nations traditional knowledge and oral history, was selected from 500 finalists by a team of international e-content experts in New Delhi.

The site, which has already gathered numerous national and international awards, was created by SFU's Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and new media specialists from the Learning and Instructional Development Centre (LIDC), in concert with the Xa:ytem Centre in Mission.

The Battle of Maple Tree Square

Vancouver 'Gastown riots' August 7, 1971

One thousand protesters clashed with police in 'The Battle of Maple Tree Square,' angered by the actions of undercover police agents and their targeting of 'hippies' who advocated the legalization of marijuana. The cops arrested seventy-nine and charged thirty-eight with various offenses. Mayor Tom Campbell went on an anti-hippie rampage, attempting to invoke the War Measures Act against the flower children, draft dodgers, and anti-war protesters, a number of whom led a symbolic invasion of the United States soon after the marijuana protests, surging into Blaine, Washington.

A judicial inquiry into the Gastown events headed by Justice Thomas Dohm heard lurid police testimony of the role of 'professional revolutionaries' in orchestrating the events, a number of whom turned out to be local poets. Dohm concluded that the police had rioted and, in their indiscriminate beatings, use of riot batons, and unprecedented employment of horse-backed charges on crowds of tourists and onlookers, had overstepped the bounds of their authority.

-- Brian D. Palmer, Canada's 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era

Image source here.

Variations on the theme of manhood

Women at Risk

Bob Herbert, New York Times: One of the striking things about mass killings in the US is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls... Dr. James Gilligan [says] 'What I've concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal, is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one's manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.'

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation's women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female... We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.

[US] Female managers face more harassment

Globe and Mail: 'Male co-workers, clients and supervisors appear to be using harassment as an 'equalizer' against women in power, consistent with research showing that sexual harassment is less about sexual desire than about control and domination,' wrote the American researchers, whose long-scale longitudinal study was presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association...

'By objectifying women, it strips them of any power or prestige that they hold in the workplace,' Ms. McLaughlin said... [She] said that mostly, men harassed their bosses in order to impress other men at work... In the workplace cases, 'it's not that they're trying to get the woman fired or get her to quit her job; it's about proving your manhood and masculinity to other men.'

Guatemala's 'femicide' crisis

Al Jazeera: The savage methods being used by street gangs in their fight against each other are now being used against women. Gang-related violence has increased sharply here in recent years, amid an increase in drug-trafficking activity. But while the murder rate cuts evenly across both sexes, women's groups point out that females are killed simply because of their gender... Odilia Sanchez's niece was raped and killed by three men hoping to rise through the ranks of their gang. She was only three years old. Her father found her dead, naked and badly beaten, after searching for hours...

The pattern of violence includes sexual assault and physical torture before the women are killed and their bodies dumped in public places... Those who dare challenge the power of men in Guatemalan society often pay with their lives and only two per cent of crimes against women are solved. Adela Chacon Tax was tortured and stabbed to death by a man whom she refused to date. Her body was thrown in a ditch in Escuintla.

Congo's Rape Epidemic Worsens During US-Backed Military Operation

Stephanie McCrummen, Washington Post: An already staggering epidemic of rape has become markedly worse since the January deployment of tens of thousands of poorly trained, poorly paid Congolese soldiers, with people in front-line villages such as this one saying the soldiers are not so much hunting rebels as hunting women...

'After reaching an area, the soldiers are taking everything there as the spoils of war, including the women,' said Honore Bisimwa who works with a non profit group, Olame Center... 'They take them like property.'... 'If soldiers meet you, they will rape you,' Ngalya said. 'They don't fear anything.'... 'In this territory, men take women like an instrument that doesn't have any value.'...

'The truth is like this,' said one officer, sitting under a shed and sipping a powerful local brew. 'What is making the soldiers do these bad things is their treatment by the army. Imagine, one can of sardines?! And you send a soldier away for 10 years?! So, I'm hungry, I'm in need of a wife and I have no money' to pay for a prostitute... 'If I see a woman walking on the road, and I love her, I will take her. I will help myself.' The lieutenant, who did not give his name, is in charge of teaching the soldiers about human rights.

Image source here.

Harpercons regress foreign policy

'Gender Equality,' 'Child Soldiers' and 'Humanitarian Law' are Axed from Foreign Policy Language

Embassy: With subtle strokes of the pen, it appears the Conservative government has been systematically changing the language employed by the foreign service and, as a result, bringing subtle but sweeping changes to traditional Canadian foreign policy...

Errol Mendes, a professor of international law at the University of Ottawa... said that such changes to the language, depending on the context, could be an attempt to downplay the International Criminal Court... In fact, a source close to Foreign Affairs told Embassy that the Prime Minister's Office had once tried to change Canada's official position on the ICC to essentially state that Canada does not support the ICC, it tolerates it...

Removing references to 'gender equality' and 'gender-based violence' are particularly sensitive because it is Canada who, in the past couple of decades, has led the fight to bring these terms into the international development and human rights agenda...

Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada... said it is fundamentally important that 'gender-based violence' be recognized as a particular form of human rights abuse at the United Nations and elsewhere because it reflects the fact that it is women, particularly in the midst of conflict, who disproportionately experience very serious and distinct forms of gender-based violence...

"The term 'gender' has a specific meaning, it refers to a series of socially constructed roles,' said Maxwell Cameron, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia. He said that removing the term 'gender' from Canada's foreign policy vocabulary would mean there are a host of issues that can no longer be talked about in a meaningful or clear way.

As the source close to Foreign Affairs explained, the social conservative base is looking for some wins out of the Harper government.

"And one of the ones they're getting is these kinds of languages," the source said. "It's a substantial change in philosophy and for anybody outside who's followed Canadian foreign policy, if you were to talk to the Nordics or the Brits or the Dutch, they would be shaking their heads. They wouldn't understand what was going on, and would ask 'why are you contesting language which everyone's accepted and which you helped pioneer?'"

Image from UN Millennium Development Goals

What's not on the agenda

Three amigos and guns

Toronto Star: It's the 'iron river' of smuggled guns flowing from the US to both Canada and Mexico, and leaving destruction in its wake.

Mexico's ambassador to Washington has accused the US of fuelling drug-related violence in which some 6,000 people have died in the last year alone. He said there was 'direct correlation' between the overturning of a 2004 US law banning assault weapons and Mexico's upswing in seizures of those guns on its own turf...

A recent study by three international researchers suggested that two-thirds of criminally used guns seized across Canada have American origins. And last year, more than 500 restricted and prohibited weapons were confiscated by Canadian border security officials, a figure they say is only 3 per cent of the total smuggled into the country.

During the pro-gun Bush administration, there was little hope of convincing Washington to come to grips with the problem. Ironically, while President George W. Bush called for tighter border controls to fend off would-be Canadian terrorists, he had no evidence that the hypothetical terrorists had killed any Americans. Meanwhile, illegally-smuggled US guns were demonstrably injuring Canadians.

Image source here.

Take a break and watch this

Video: Kseniya Simonova -- Sand animation

(Україна має талант / Ukraine's Got Talent)

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 64 years

Daniel Ellsberg: Our popular image of nuclear war -- from the familiar pictures of the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima -- is grotesquely misleading. Those pictures show us only what happens to humans and buildings when they are hit by what is now just the detonating cap for a modern nuclear weapon.

Drug company fakes science to push HRT

Medical Papers by Ghostwriters Pushed Therapy

The New York Times: Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a pharmaceutical company played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known.

The articles, published in medical journals between 1998 and 2005, emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia. That supposed medical consensus benefited Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company that paid a medical communications firm to draft the papers, as sales of its hormone drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion in 2001.

But the seeming consensus fell apart in 2002 when a huge federal study on hormone therapy was stopped after researchers found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke. A later study found that hormones increased the risk of dementia in older patients...

The articles appeared in 18 medical journals, including The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The International Journal of Cardiology. The articles did not disclose Wyeth's role in initiating and paying for the work. Elsevier, the publisher of some of the journals, said it was disturbed by the allegations of ghostwriting and would investigate...

Dr. Joseph S. Ross, an assistant professor of geriatrice at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, who has conducted research on ghostwriting [said] 'You don't know which articles are tainted and which aren't.' Because physicians rely on medical literature, the concern about ghostwriting is that doctors might change their prescribing habits after reading certain articles, unaware they were commissioned by a drug company.

Image source here.

Sea ice thins, tundra heats up

New NASA Satellite Survey Reveals Dramatic Arctic Sea Ice Thinning

Arctic tundra hotter, boosting global warming: BC expert

Vancouver Sun: Regions of Arctic tundra around the world are heating up very rapidly, releasing more greenhouse gases than predicted and boosting the process of global warming... Professor Greg Henry of the University of British Columbia also said higher temperatures meant larger plants were starting to spread across the tundra, which is usually covered by small shrubs, grasses and lichen. The thicker plant cover means the region is getting darker and absorbing more heat. He said tundra covers about 15 per cent of the world's surface and makes up about 30 per cent of Canadian territory.

Henry, who has been working in the Arctic since the early 1980s, said he had measured 'a very substantial change' in the tundra over the last three decades... Since 1970, he said, temperatures in the tundra region had risen by 1 degree Celsius per decade -- equal to the highest rates of warming found anywhere on the planet. 'We're finding that the tundra is actually giving off a log more nitrous oxide and methane than anyone had thought before... We're really trying to get a handle on this because (if further tests show) that's true, this actually changes the entire greenhouse gas budget for the North, and that has global implications.'

Image: NASA

US war economy

From The New York Times.

'You couldn't ask for a better boss.'

From Paul Hawken's Commencement Address to the Class of 2009

University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009

Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating... Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades... And here's the deal: Forget that this task is not possible in the time required...

If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore the this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse... You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day... This is the largest movement the world has ever seen...

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers... This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know... And today tens of millions of people do this every day...

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams... In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours... In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe...

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body?... One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it... You can feel it. It is called life... Second question: who is in charge of your body?... Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature... What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past... Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn't ask for a better boss.

Image source here.

Afghanistan: 'The absurdity of the war'

War without purpose

Chris Hedges, Truthdig: No one seems to be able to articulate why we are in Afghanistan. Is it to hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaida? Is it to consolidate progress? Have we declared war on the Taliban? Are we building democracy? Are we fighting terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here? Are we 'liberating' the women of Afghanistan? The absurdity of the questions, used as thought-terminating cliches, exposes the absurdity of the war. The confusion of purpose mirrors the confusion on the ground. We don't know what we are doing.

Al-Qaida, terrorists bit players in Afghan attacks 2004-2008: report

The Canadian Press: Al-Qaida and other hard-core terrorists groups are behind only a fraction of the attacks carried out in Afghanistan over a four-year period... Ethnic Pashtun Taliban were responsible for 97 per cent of the bombings, ambushes and kidnappings... Violence is driven from the ground up rather than from outside the country. Washington and Ottawa for years have claimed the troops are fighting international terrorists in Afghanistan in order to prevent attacks in North America... Civilian bombings and shootings by NATO forces have contributed to the growing violence... Kandahar City and the surrounding area, where Canada's 2,850 troops and aircrew are based, was the most violent region in the country.

Armageddon at the Top of the World: Not!

Juan Cole, in TomDispatch: Few of the Pashtuns in question, even the rebellious ones, are really Taliban; few so-called Taliban are entwined with what little is left of al-Qaeda in the region; and Iran and Russia are not, of course, actually supporting the latter. There maybe plausible reasons for which the US and NATO wish to spend blood and treasure in an attempt to forcibly shape the politics of the 38 million Pashtuns on either side of the Durand Line in the twenty-first century. That they form a dire menace to the security of the North Atlantic world is not one of them.

Civilian deaths up 24 per cent in Afghanistan: UN

The Globe and Mail: Two thirds of the deaths caused by the Afghan government forces or its international allies came in air strikes.

War Complicates Aid Efforts for Afghan Women

Truthout: Orzala Ashraf Nemat, a leading civil society and human rights activist in Kabul, disagrees with the US troop buildup. 'As an Afghan woman I feel the military is definitely not the solution... Look at what is happening with the troop increase. This year there is more violence and more fighting and more threats, more suicide bombings. Women and children are the main victims of fighting and war... Sweeta Noori, Afghanistan's country director for Women for Women International [said] the vast majority of women in Afghanistan have seen no improvement in gender-based discrimination and violence... Women's rights have actually deteriorated as a direct consequence of deliberate US policy, including alliances with warlords hostile to women's rights... 'Additionally, the US war has fueled a misogynist insurgency that has only gotten stronger and worsened anti-woman sentiment.'

Afghanistan women outraged at proposed family law

The Guardian: The law has already achieved its aim -- instilling fear and insecurity among an already traumatised female population... Jamila Barekzai is a police officer whose female colleague was killed last year in Kandahar for daring to do a man's job... 'The biggest problem facing women today in Afghanistan, aside from illiteracy, is the lack of support. It is always the intention of men to keep women in their cages. To keep women down.'

Image source here.