For the right-wing critics who shout, “but what about all the good news from Iraq the liberal media does not talk about?”, :
BAGHDAD - Amid the carnage of Baghdad, romance can still be found in the eyes of two young Iraqis, who first exchanged glances through their kitchen windows.
Living in different apartment buildings – but only 10 yards away as the potato flies – the coquettish Fatima and the persistent Bashar launched a bumpy 15-month courtship.
“She was cooking in the kitchen. I was cooking, too, and I saw her – it was love at first sight,” says Bashar, clearly elated over his recent engagement to Fatima, the oldest daughter of matriarch Karima Selman Methboub, a sturdy Iraqi widow with eight children whom the Monitor first profiled in 2002.
This tightknit family has been feeling the brunt of the war (by one count, 16 nearby bombings in a three week span) but like many Iraqis they are too poor to flee. In recent months, they have been blessed by the engagements of two daughters, yet buffeted by a string of car bombs which prompted a rare neighborhood candlelight vigil to “challenge the terrorists.”
I hope with all my heart that they can live happily ever after, in a world without violence.
This is one of the most disturbing posts I have done. So hard that I don’t even know where to start. Wait, :
Iraqi human rights advocate and writer Haifa Zangana, the first question asked of female detainees in Iraq is, “Are you Sunni or Shia?” The second is, “Are you a virgin?”
Are you Sunni or Shia? Are you a virgin?? In other words, do you remember the first time you got raped? I can’t find this any more appalling.
The mainstream media has ignored Iraq, but the whole fucking world has ignored the plight of Iraqi women under U.S. occupation. Beaten, humilliated and ignored, Iraqi women are among many of the “collaterals” of the U.S. “war on terror”.
The above is from a story from , an excellent international women’s rights organization. The article is entitled “” and you can pretty much see why I’m so outraged by this.
The international news media is flooded with images of a woman in a pink headscarf recounting a shattering experience of rape by members of the Iraqi National Police. Most of the media coverage has focused on her taboo-breaking decision to speak publicly about the assault, but has missed two crucial points for understanding—and combating—sexual violence by Iraqi police recruits.
As Iraqi women’s organizations have documented, sexualized torture is a routine horror in Iraqi jails. While this woman may be the first Iraqi rape survivor to appear on television, she is hardly the first to accuse the Iraqi National Police of sexual assault. At least nine Iraqi organizations as well as Amnesty International, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq and the Brussels Tribunal have documented the sexualized torture of Iraqi women while in police custody. These include , Occupation Watch, the , the Iraqi League, the , the Human Rights’ Voice of Freedom, the Association of Muslim Scholars, the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Iraqi National Media and Culture Organization. […] And the United Nations special investigator on torture is reporting that torture in Iraq is
Where is the outrage? It is not like these abuses have not been documented. They have been extensively documented - click on any of the links above and you will find plenty of references and eye-witness accounts. Why is the U.S. mainstream media ignoring this whole issue? I know it is kind of touchy, but that is why you are in the news business - to discuss and highlight serious issues, and bring to light those that need attention, not to “discuss the ramifications” of Britney Spears shaving her head.
Take this horrowing account from . All emphasis is mine:
MALTREATMENT AND PROOF: On 20 April 2004, Abdul-Bassat Turki, the first Iraqi minister of human rights, gave an interview to The Guardian on the condition of female prisoners in Iraq. Turki had recently resigned from his post in protest against the human rights violations committed by American forces and Paul Bremer’s determination to ignore his reports and to refuse him permission to visit Abu Ghraib.
Turki told the Guardian that he had warned Bremer repeatedly of the abuses of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, but that Bremer had consistently ignored all warnings. In December 2003, a month before the US military mounted its own secret investigation into Abu Ghraib, Turki phoned Bremer to complain of the treatment of female detainees. “They had been denied medical treatment. They had no proper toilet. They had only been given one blanket, even though it was winter,” the former minister said.
[…]One of the rare occasions in which Anne Clwyd, the British human rights envoy to Iraq, was moved to speak out about human rights violations after the invasion was when she learned of the arrest and subsequent torture of a 70-year-old woman, whose torturers forced her into a makeshift bridle and then mounted her like a donkey.
[…]Hoda Al-Ezawi relates that she was kept in solitary confinement for 156 days. Then her sister was arrested and thrown into the cell with her, along with the corpse of their dead brother. Among the other types of torture inflicted upon her was to be kept standing for more than 12 hours straight while subject to continual threat and intimidation. US forces and the Iraqi National Guard arrested Al-Ezawi along with her two daughters, Nora, 15, and Sara, 20, on 17 February 2005 on the charge of supporting the resistance.
Ali Al-Qeisi, the man whose torturers thrust a bag over his head, forced to stand on a crate as they coiled wires around him and then photographed producing the picture that has become a worldwide symbol of the occupation and the horror of Abu Ghraib, recalls his anguish at hearing the screams and cries of female detainees. “Their food was brought into their cells by naked men,” he relates, adding, “we felt helpless as we listened to their screams, unable to do anything but pray to God Almighty.”
[…]Suheib Baz, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, told The Independent that he had personally seen a 12-year-old girl being tortured: “She was naked, and crying out to me for help while being beaten.” He also relates that prison wardens would photograph these horrors.
[…]This is the tip of the iceberg. A report published by the Iraqi National Association for Human Rights on 29 October 2005 found that women held in Interior Ministry detention centres are subject to numerous human rights violations, including “systematic rape by the investigators and to other forms of bodily harm in order to coerce them into making confessions”. The report added that prisons fail to meet even the most basic standards of hygiene and that the women were deprived of facilities as fundamental as toilets. The Ministry of Justice has confirmed the accuracy of the report.
In such circumstances, it is insult to injury that female detainees are often forced to sign a paper prior to their release in which they testify to being properly treated. The purpose of this affidavit is to silence them and deprive them of recourse to litigation in the future.
It should be noted, here, that the first question that is put to female detainees is: “Are you Sunni or Shia?” The second is, “Are you a virgin?”
Of course, this is all the work of a “few bad apples”. Basically, the U.S. has turned a blind eye towards everything that is going on in Iraq. It is not only causing these atrocities, it is fomenting, paying for them, and then ignoring them. Does the Bush administration think people are stupid, that we can’t fact-check what the say, and especially, what they don’t say?
It’s no surprise that we’re hearing allegations of rape against the Iraqi National Police, considering who trained them. DynCorp, the private contractor that the Bush Administration hired to prepare Iraq’s new police force for duty, has an ugly record of violence against women. The company was contracted by the federal government in the 1990s to train police in the Balkans. DynCorp employees were found to have systematically committed sex crimes against women, . One DynCorp site supervisor videotaped himself raping two women. Despite strong evidence against them, the contractors never faced criminal charges and are back on the federal payroll.
Owing young women as slaves. A videotape by a supervisor raping two women. Giving them a blank check so they can continue to do whatever it is they do. Aren’t these war crimes? Again, where is the outrage? Why isn’t ABC news, CBS, NBC, Fox News (yeah, right), or CNN covering this?
I’m not overly religious, but do believe we eventually have to pay up what we do on Earth. I can’t even fathom how many lifetimes we are going to need to “repay” these atrocities. Then again, .
Also, a spokesman indicated that first lady Anita Perry’s strong support for the vaccine may have played a role in the governor’s decision. A former nurse and the daughter of a doctor, Anita Perry works for an organization dealing with sexual assaults.
“I know they have discussed it, and it’s something they both feel very strongly about,” said Press Secretary Robert Black.
But some who oppose the bill have suggested that a political contribution from the vaccine-maker influenced his decision.
So his wife, a former health professional, may have had a bit to do with it. Do I buy that? Sure, why not - but lots of first ladies are involved in humanitarian and educational endeavors as well. If politicians actually listened to their wives a little, things would be a lot better in ALL countries.
Here is a great op-ed by (yes, the one that was persecuted a la Bill Clinton for his sexual escapades) about the need, and opportunity, :
The most recent estimate, and the first in more than a decade, shows that at minimum 744,000 men, women and children experienced homelessness in the United States on any given night in January 2005. Distressingly, about 23 percent had a disability and were homeless for long periods.
These numbers are derived from taking a snapshot of the problem; the reality is that homelessness is quite fluid and that over the course of the year about 3.5 million people are without a home.
These grim statistics add up to a single truth: There are too many people who experience homelessness and far too many who spend years — quite literally — sleeping on the streets. What these statistics do not address, but what we know is also true, is that many more people are living on the periphery of homelessness, at risk of eviction or living in a precarious situation because they cannot afford their housing.
Certainly we have the resources to end homelessness. And, importantly, we have the knowledge. Across the country, new solutions have emerged, strategies that focus less on shelters and soup kitchens — the proverbial hot and a cot — and much more on long-term solutions like preventing homelessness in the first place and getting people back into permanent housing rapidly instead of letting them languish in emergency shelter.
He is definitely right in that we do have the resources. In fact most countries do - they just need to focus the money on where it counts, not on petty things like war and corruption. This is especially true after hurricane Katrina.
While only government can fully stamp out homelessness, individual civic groups are the ones that are leading the way:
One breakthrough strategy is called . This approach minimizes the time people spend in a shelter by providing access to permanent housing and then, after people are stably housed, services that address other needs. That way, the individual or family has stable housing while they sort out how to make improvements in their lives.
I have seen great success with this approach across the United States, with marked decreases in homelessness. In San Francisco, Housing First approaches helped reduce homelessness by 28 percent; in Columbus, 46 percent among families; and 43 percent among families in Hennepin County, Minn.
Postings have been quite slow around here… have been busy studying and fighting a nasty . I’m afraid postings will suffer in the next couple of months, at least until June, when my baby is born.
But on with another story. Normally I roll my eyes and don’t bother with asinine stories, but :
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Women should wear chastity belts to prevent rape, incest and other sex crimes, a prominent Islamic cleric in northern Malaysia was quoted as saying Friday.
Abu Hassan Din Al Hafiz, speaking in the northern state of Terengganu, said chastity belts could protect women from a growing number of sex crimes in Malaysia, The Star newspaper reported.
The best way to avert sex perpetrators is to wear protection,’ Abu Hassan told a crowd of followers. My intention is not to offend women but to safeguard them from sex maniacs.’
Yes Mr. Cleric, women must wear chastity belts… is it too much to ask to educate the men over there that women should not be raped? I’m using the word “men” loosely here, people who rape women and children are beasts, not humans. This seems to be a concept that men worldwide don’t get: you CANNOT rape a women just because you feel like it. It is in the books you morons - rape somebody and you are going to jail, pure and simple. And if a woman is raped, it is NOT her fault:
Religious leaders in Malaysia’s conservative north have in the past blamed sexual attacks on women wearing provocative clothing and make up.
Just in case you don’t know what a chastity belt is, here is a pic. I’m sure the cleric won’t mind.
NAIROBI - The world’s poor, who are the least responsible for global warming, will suffer the most from climate change, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told environment ministers from around the world on Monday.
“The degradation of the global environment continues unabated … and the effects of climate change are being felt across the globe,” Ban said in a statement after last week’s toughest warning yet mankind is to blame for global warming.
In comments read on his behalf at the start of a major week-long gathering in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, Ban said all countries would feel the adverse impact of climate change.
“But it is the poor, in Africa and developing small island states and elsewhere, who will suffer the most, even though they are the least responsible for global warming.”
Why Africa will be one of the most affected is not secret:
Experts say Africa is the lowest emitter of the greenhouse gases blamed for rising temperatures, but due to its poverty, under-development and geography, has the most to lose under dire predictions of wrenching change in weather patterns.
(From the excellent Editorial Cartoons of , from NewsWeek)
Some updates are coming this week. The structure of this blog is going to be overhauled a bit. It will include a blogroll of all the fine bloggers who have linked me, left comments, or just passed by.
Also, if you notice, the categories section of my blog includes several countries, which I’m going to organize a bit based on regions, i.e. Iraq, Iran, will go under Middle East, African countries under Africa, and so on. This will make the blog easier to navigate.
Finally, I’m going to add a “news section” to the website, where just links to news items on relevant topics - like women’s health and human rights - will be posted. Reading the blog statistics, I notice that most people that visit my blog based on search engine results (Google, Yahoo!, Altavista) are looking for specific information based on my postings (like the number of victims from natural disasters).
HOUSTON, Feb. 2 — Texas on Friday became the first state to require all 11- and 12-year-old girls entering the sixth grade to be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.
Averting a potentially divisive debate in the Legislature, Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, signed an executive order mandating shots of the Merck vaccine Gardasil as protection against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, starting in September 2008.
Mr. Perry’s action, praised by health advocates, caught many by surprise in a largely conservative state where sexual politics is often a battleground.
“I had no idea; I was absolutely caught off guard,” said Representative Jessica Farrar, Democrat of Houston, who sponsored a bill to require the vaccinations starting this September. “Normally, the governor does not take things like this upon himself, although I’m glad he did.”
If you live in Texas and see some snow falling, it is not due to global warming, it is because Gov. Rick Perry - a stalwart conservative republican who is against abortion and stem-cell research - finally recognized that doing the right thing :
“Requiring young girls to get vaccinated before they come into contact with HPV is responsible health and fiscal policy that has the potential to significantly reduce cases of cervical cancer and mitigate future medical costs,” said Mr. Perry, who was re-elected to his second full term last November.
And it is :
It is Republican Gov. Rick Perry who issued an executive order directing the state’s Health Human Services Commission (HHSC) to get ready to administer the HPV vaccine in girls at noted ages before they enter sixth grade.
The order, effective September 2008, also directs HHSC and the Department of State Health Services (DSHS) to “make the vaccine immediately available to eligible young females through the Texas Vaccines for Children program for young women ages 9 to 18, and through Medicaid for women ages 19 to 21,” says the statement of the governor’s office on its website.
See? It wasn’t that hard. Good for you, Gov. Perry. So every parent must vaccinate their school-aged girls with , right? :
Under the order, girls and women from 9 to 21 eligible for public assistance could get free shots immediately. The governor’s office said parents could opt out of the school program “for reasons of conscience, including religious beliefs.”
Ahh, I see. So at least he didn’t completely screw over his conservative friends. I wonder what is the point of having a mandatory vaccination program if parents can opt out because of religious beliefs, but I digress. Time and education will eventually replace misinformation and stereotypes.
But I wonder, did Gov. Perry did this out of the goodness of his conservative heart, or because the scientific evidence finally convinced the guy? If by “scientific evidence” you mean , then yes, he was convinced:
Is Perry’s order politically motivated? No one knows. But, USA Today has reported today that Perry has several ties to Merck, the maker of the HPV vaccine, and Women in Government, a not-for-profit organization comprised of state woman regulators, which some watchdog has claimed is too cozy with Merck.
Media has reported that Women in Government is quite active in promoting the Merck’s vaccine, which analysts say is positioned to make Merck more than billion dollars a year. According to USA Today, Mike Toomey, Perry’s former chief of staff, serves as one of the drug company’s three lobbyists in Texas. Perry’s current chief of staff’s mother-in-law, Texas Republican state Rep. Dianne White Delisi, is a head of Women in Government.
“Perry also received $6,000 from Merck’s political action committee during his re-election campaign,” USA Today says.
Ah, now everything seems to make sense. A conservative politician from Texas is opposed to everything this vaccine stands for, and knows he can lose his conservative base over this, but he can make up those votes from the other side, and make a ton of money for his friends at Merck in the process.
Now let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment. Is there a conflict of interest here? Very likely. But are Gov. Perry’s actions regarding mandatory HPV vaccination wrong? Well, no. Merck does make the damn vaccine, and a generic will not become available in a long time. This vaccine represents a huge leap forward for women’s health. At around $400 for 3 shots over an 8-month period, it is expensive, and most health plans will NOT cover it. But while preventing cervical cancer is morally and medically correct, :
Mr. Perry says it makes sense to use the vaccine to prevent cervical cancer which would otherwise cause a large burden on medical expenditure. But does this mandatory inoculation of the HPV vaccine really save medical costs?
On average, a 5-year treatment for a case of cervical caner would cost $11,000, early studies show. For a 5-year span, about 5800 new cases of the disease are expected to be diagnosed in Texas, which means the medical cost for five years is 63.8 millions or 12.8 million a year.
In Texas, there are about 6.31 millions people now under age 18, meaning the number of girls who are required to receive the HPV vaccine each year is about 0.35 million. The total number of girls to receive the vaccine is 1.76 million, meaning that Merck can rake in 630 million dollars in five years or 126 million dollars in the vaccine sales in Texas alone with Mr. Perry’s order.
The cost for the first year would be double the price tag as girls both at age 11 and 12 will receive the vaccine. The calculation is based on the price of the vaccine at $360 per girl.
It seems that this state mandatory vaccination can save about 700 women’s lives a year in Texas at a cost of 126 million dollars a year spent on the preventive vaccine. These 700 women would otherwise need 7.7 million dollars for treatment of their cervical cancer.
Perry’s order can save some women’s lives, but it does not save money.
I am not saying that vaccinating women with Gardasil is not worth it - it is. It does make sense from a public health point of view, because cervical cancer it is the second most common cancer in women after breast cancer. Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, will definitely be most valuable in the developing world, where most women don’t have access to a yearly . But the big fight, the one that will set the precedents for other countries to follow, is taking place in the United States and Texas, of all places, just landed a knockout blow.
out today show disasters killed 21,342 people worldwide in 2006, compared with 82,061 the year before. Economic losses caused by natural hazards also fell, to just $19 billion in 2006, compared with $210 billion the year before.
These heartening figures, released by the , are a reflection of what didn’t happen in 2006. No massive temblors like the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 that killed 73,338. And certainly nothing like the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, which left 230,000 dead or missing. Nor were there hurricanes to rival Katrina, Wilma or Rita that together racked up $166 billion in damages in the United States.
That’s the good news - and news that confirms a trend observed since 2000.
“The number of people killed by disasters has been decreasing, if we do not take into account the two mega events: the tsunami in the Indian Ocean and the earthquake in Pakistan,” said Debarati Guha-Sapir from CRED.
The bad news is that even as disasters are claiming fewer lives, the number of people affected by them remains staggeringly high at 134.5 million in 2006. That’s down a bit from 158 million in 2005 (again, a number inflated by the Kashmir quake) but far higher than in decades past.
So what you might say? So the magnitude of disasters come and go. But it is not just as simple as watching the weather forecasts. We need to connect the dots between natural disasters, global warming, poverty, and health & human rights.
Thankfully, the article made them for me!
That said, it’s still people in Africa and Asia who bear the brunt of disasters due to an intrinsic link between poverty and vulnerability to risk - a link that explains why an earthquake that hits Los Angeles, say, is likely to kill far fewer people than a quake of similar magnitude that hits Java or Bam.
That’s because poor countries often lack the resources to mitigate against hazards, whether by setting up early warning systems, protecting livelihoods or building risk-reduction strategies into their development plans. Again the figures bear this out.
Last year the United States was hit by more natural disasters than any country except China (26, compared with China’s 35). But if you rank countries by the number of people killed or affected per 100,000 inhabitants, the U.S. hardly even figures.
By this count, Malawi tops the list with 34,331 per 100,000 people, followed by Burundi (26,778) and Kenya (11,935).
That these three nations are among the poorest countries in the world - and thus among the least able to take the impact of climate change in their stride - is surely no coincidence.
Courtesy of (and from the same article), here’s a breakdown of the world’s 10 deadliest disasters in 2006, followed by a list of countries most hit by disasters and numbers killed or affected per 100,000 inhabitants:
Disaster Country Toll Earthquake (May) Indonesia 5,778 Typhoon Durian (Dec) Philippines 1,399 Landslide (Feb) Philippines 1,112 Heat wave (July) Netherlands 1,000 Heat wave (July) Belgium 940 Typhoon Bilis (July) China 820 Tsunami (July) Indonesia 802 Cold wave (Jan) Ukraine 801 Flash flood (Aug) Ethiopia 498 Typhoon Samoai (Aug) China 373
Natural disasters per country - 2006
China 35 United States 26 Indonesia, Philippines 20 India 17 Afghanistan 13 Vietnam 10 Australia, Burundi, Pakistan 8 Ethiopia, Mexico, Romania 7 Germany 6
Victims (killed or affected) of natural disasters per 100,000 people - 2006
Malawi 34,331 Burundi 26,778 Kenya 11,935 Philippines 9,097 Afghanistan 7,194 China 6,753 Somalia 5,490 Thailand 5,040 Guyana 4,562 Vietnam 3,969
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