Archive - Feb 19, 2012

Bride trafficking is a new practice that has developed over the last couple of decades in India. It is the practice of selling women into marriage against their will. Bride traffickers pretend to be marriage brokers, intermediaries for families in distant areas of India. They often promise arranged marriages for socio-economically vulnerable women from poor families, but sometimes they threaten violence to convince women to leave their homes. The women mostly come from rural villages and are lured by false promises from traffickers. Once the traffickers have them, they sell the women to men willing to pay for brides. Some women say they were drugged to keep them from escaping as they were transported and sold, and often the women are sold multiple times as brides to different men.

Brides are given the derogatory name “paros,” which means purchased women. Their enslavement brings with it a loss of social status. They have no property or means of their own, and nobody wants to give them jobs. Their roles as brides do not simply include sexual slavery; many have to perform hard labor all day and suffer physical and verbal abuse from their husbands.

The Haryana province is an important destination for bride trafficking because of a gender imbalance, in some places as low as seven women for every ten men. One cause of the imbalance is technological development; middle-class families can more easily use ultrasound machines to determine the sex of their babies, and mothers abort approximately 50,000 female fetuses every month in India. In poorer families, parents sometimes kill or abandon female babies. Dowries are outlawed, but they are still common practice in India. Though the low number of women drives the demand for brides up, the cost of dowries is too high for many families to afford.

Indian NGOs attempt to combat bride trafficking, but pursuing instances of bride trafficking is difficult because the victims typically come from rural areas and are sold to distant, isolated villages. Because arranged marriages are legal, authorities must prove the women were forced into marriage in order to pursue arrests.

Sources: “Slavery: A 21st Century Evil – Bridal Slaves,” Al Jazeera, November 15, 2011 http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/slaverya21stcenturyevil/2011/10/2011....
“‘All Those Little Faces’: Elizabeth Vargas Explores India’s ‘Gendercide,’” Elizabeth Vargas, ABC News, December 10,2011 http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2011/12/all-those-little-faces-eli....
“Cops Bust Bride Trafficking Ring in Haryana,” Dwaipayan Ghosh, Times of India, September 21, 2011 http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-09-21/delhi/30184395_1_....

Student Researchers: Mallory Buth, Elaine Wiley
Faculty Instructor: Kevin Howley, Ph. D.
Evaluator: Anne Harris, Ph. D., Director of Women’s Studies Program
DePauw UniversitySimilar Posts:

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• Human Trafficking in the United States

On November 22, after four hours of deliberation the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) gave a unanimous guilty verdict that found Tony Blair and George W Bush guilty of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and genocide in relation to their roles in the invasion of Iraq. The KLWCC was a tribunal in Malaysia consisting of five judges with extensive judicial and academic backgrounds. The proceedings took place from November 19-22, and found that these two former heads of state had selectively manipulated international law, organized the unlawful aggression, and committed an international crime in 2003 by invading Iraq.

The commission found that both Blair and Bush had contemplated invading Iraq as early as 2001. It was found that both men had admitted that they believed or knew the unreliability of the intelligence reports on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. With this information they still chose to continue with an invasion to over throw Iraq’s dictator. The memoirs of both men were included as evidence in the case showing each man’s intention to invade Iraq in spite of international law.

Bush and Blair were invited to offer their own defense or send a representative, but both declined to do so. It was argued that Bush had exhausted all forms of diplomacy and had received intelligence on Iraq for over two years before launching the invasion. On this note the tribunal believed that the Bush administration had fabricated documents to have it appear as though Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

The KLWCC’s verdict holds no legal weight, but the symbolic value of the guilty verdict is measurable. The tribunal, in its ruling, said that it would report the findings to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and that the KLWCC will enter the names of Bush and Blair in to the Register of War Criminals maintained by the KLWCC. Finally, the tribunal will provide the two names to the members of the Rome Statute, which allows those states to prosecute the individuals of international crimes in national courts.

Sources: “Kuala Lumpur tribunal: Bush and Blair guilty” Richard Falk, Aljazeera, November 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111128105712109215.html

“Bush and Blair found guilty” Eunice Au, New Straits Times, November 2011, http://www.nst.com.my/local/general/bush-and-blair-found-guilty-1.9641

“Bush, Blair found guilty of war crimes” Press TV, Infowars.com, November 2011, http://www.infowars.com/bush-blair-found-guilty-of-war-crimes/

Student: Taylor Wagner and Ben Brandstatter

Faculty Instructor: Kevin Howley, Ph.D.

Evaluator: Robert Dewey, D. Phil., History

DePauw UniversitySimilar Posts:

• The War in Iraq: Sponsored in Part by the Corporate Media
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In the past 12 months (2010-2011) there has been a wealth of news coverage on a new brand of synthetic drugs called bath salts. These drugs come in a powdery or crystal form and cause effects similar to cocaine, PCP, and ecstasy. The sale and distribution of these drugs are currently legal. The U.S. military was giving their input on the powdery and crystalline substances in an internal “criminal intelligence bulletin.” Military medical professionals have been quoted stating the dangers of bath salts and their fears of its movement into the military, specifically the Air Force.  The November 2010 report from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations sated that bath salts “appear to have been designed to circumvent existing drug laws and are potentially harmful.”  The Air Force has reported how many drug cases they have had throughout this and the past year, but they do not document which type of drug the cases involve.

Officials at Nellis Air Force base have noted a rise in cases of the drug used within the area. These psychoactive drugs are highly dangerous, causing side effects compared to those of such drugs as methamphetamine and cocaine, including hallucinations, panic attacks, and psychosis, while remaining undetectable on drug tests. The fear that Air Force women/men will begin using these drugs on a high level has caused the Air Force Warfare Center Commander to ban the substances, thus making any use of Bath Salts a career ending move. If soldiers are found using Bath Salts they will be dishonorably discharged. The Air Force believes that these drugs pose a great risk to the users and those around them.  The user and the rest of the community are at risk because of the extended period for which the drug takes effect. Individuals are able to seriously harm themselves when taking Bath Salts and do not remember doing so. While on Bath Salts men/women do not feel the pain, and thus are more likely to cause harm to themselves or others. At least twenty-eight states have banned the chemicals in bath salts.

Sources: “Air Force Fears New ‘Drug Craze’” Nick Turse, AlterNet, September 2011, http://www.alternet.org/news/152547

“Bath salts hurt physical, mental well-being” Senior Airmen Michael Charles, Nellis Public Affairs, August 2011, www.nellis.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123270106

“ ‘Bath Salts’ drug causes concern” Scott Prater, Schriever Sentinel, May 2011,

http://csmng.com/2011/05/18/‘bath-salts’-drug-causes-concern/

“Bath Salts: A dangerous new drug trend” Investigator Nicole M. Boucher, AFOSI- Hanscom Air Force Base, September 2011, http://www.hanscom.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123274140

Student Researchers: Taylor Wagner and Ben Brandstatter

Faculty Instructor: Kevin Howley Ph.D.

Evaluator: Jeffery McCall Ph.D., Communications

DePauw UniversitySimilar Posts:

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The United States, Britain, and the European Union have been the largest donors to Ethiopian development, but reports of abuse of citizens within the country and of misuse of aid have failed to initiate action from Western officials. Ethiopia receives billions of dollars in development aid annually, and recently it has been given additional emergency aid during a drought. Much as they did with anti-Soviet countries during the Cold War, the Western powers continue to align with Ethiopia for its anti-terrorist stance and because it commands a strategic geographic position in the unstable Horn of Africa.

Most of the aid goes through government channels for distribution, and members of the political opposition are denied aid for failing to support the ruling political party led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. Using the resources provided through foreign aid, the government is able to buy political support, and the billions of dollars for development does not go to those who desperately need it.

Ana Gomez, a Portuguese member of the European parliament, was the chief election observer for the EU during the 2005 election when Meles Zenawi was elected as the Ethiopian Prime Minister. She accused EU commission officials of downplaying problems in her reports about the country’s election and ignoring her reports of abuse. She stated, “What really surprised me was the feedback I got from Brussels… the department for development of the commission was completely rewriting my own report and was actually toning down, watering down, all the most difficult passages which were detailing the situation and the repression of the opposition… I was really shocked.”

Likewise, former EU Ambassador for Ethiopia Timothy Clarke sent emails to top officials in the EU. He described how Zenawi’s troops used violence against citizens supporting his opposition, but the EU did not launch an in-depth investigation. Additional credible sources and many individual accounts attest to widespread killing and rape as tools used by Ethiopian government forces.

The Human Rights Watch has reported the use of aid as a political tool, but this report has also been ignored. For example, two small villages outside of a major town did not received aid for their desperate needs, but the inhabitants within the larger town were adequately taken are of. Locals who oppose the ruling party of Ethiopia say they are denied assistance because of their political stance.

Sources

“Ethiopia ‘Using Aid as a Weapon of Oppression,’” Angus Stickler, BBC News, August 5, 2011, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/9556288.stm.

“Revealed: Aid to Ethiopia Increases Despite Serious Human Rights Abuses,” Angus Stickler and Caelainn Barr, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, August 6, 2011, http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/06/revealed-britain-and-eu-....

Student Researchers: Mallory Buth and Elaine Wiley

Faculty Instructor: Kevin Howley, Ph. D.

Evaluator: Brett O’bannon, Ph. D., Political Science and Conflict Studies

DePauw University

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AP - A small plane and a helicopter clipped each other over Northern California Sunday night, leaving two pilots with minor injuries, officials said.

AP - A small but growing number of teens and even younger children who think they were born the wrong sex are getting support from parents and from doctors who give them sex-changing treatments, according to reports in the medical journal Pediatrics.

Andre Tartar writes:

A few months ago an AP investigation uncovered an intensive NYPD effort to spy on Muslim students in several New York City colleges. The latest update from the AP finds that the program has actually included surveillance operations at a much wider network of schools, including several outside New York. (Just a few: Yale, Rutgers, Syracuse University, SUNY Buffalo and SUNY Albany.) In many cases, like in the example below, the police used student informants or outright infiltrated Muslim student meet-ups.

 

Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students' names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.

Many of the students reached by the AP were understandably shocked that their names were showing up in reports prepared for NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, often simply for being active in Muslim student associations or for receiving and forwarding e-mails about upcoming Islamic conferences. [...]

Ultimately, it seems little or no evidence was ever provided of wrongdoing (or even suspicious behavior) on the part of any of the students, and the same largely goes for the Islamic scholars participating in targeted seminars. [...]

Secret (often illegal) police spying is nothing new. Neither is reaching outside municipal boundaries to do it. The late Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department Daryl Gates ran a covert spy, infiltration and agents provocateurs operation that was exposed in the early 1980s but didn't cost Gates his job. Sometimes, departments work hand-in-glove with federal agencies; sometimes, they do it all on their own.

Always they have their excuses. And always, no matter how many times such behavior has been documented, it takes the media for friggin' ever to get around to exposing it.

Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006:

The debate over the administration's decision to bless a $6.8 billion dollar port security bill intensified this morning, with Homeland Security Chief Chertoff defending the deal.  I'd like first to provide some background on the deal which is receiving little attention from critics of the takeover.  Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation, a U.K. company, currently controls the U.S. ports in question. Those ports are located in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.  It's the fourth largest port company in the world. The shareholders of that company agreed to the deal, in which Dubai Ports World (DP World) would pay $6.8 billion to take over that company. (DP world has since announced it will take out a loan to finance the cash deal). The Bush administration gave the green light to the deal.  This deal makes DP World the third largest port operator in the world. Before the deal, it was the seventh largest.

Port security is the neglected middle child of our national security debate.  Only some 5% of containers coming into the U.S. are inspected. According to 2004 figures, in the three years after 9/11, we spent about $500 million on port security.  That's what we spend every 3 days in Iraq. [...]

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I'm looking forward to when this brief period of having to care what Rick Santorum says comes to an end.
— @drgrist via TweetDeck

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In January, a team of Navy Seal Special Operation forces rescued two aid workers being held hostage in Somalia. Two days after the raid, Former Navy Seal Commander Chuck Pfarrer sat down for a conversation about Navy Seals and their operations, at a student forum in Florida.

Adventurer fended off sharks and storms in 1969 journey, then repeated feat by crossing the Pacific in 1972

John Fairfax, the first person on record to row a boat solo across the Atlantic Ocean, has died at his Las Vegas-area home. He was 74.

The self-described "professional adventurer" died on 8 February of an apparent heart attack in Henderson, his wife, Tiffany, said on Sunday.

Fairfax gained international attention in 1969 when he became the first person in recorded history to cross the Atlantic alone by rowboat. He dealt with sharks, storms and exhaustion on the six-month, 5,000-mile (8,045km) journey from the Canary Islands to Florida.

In 1972 he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, became the first known people to row across the Pacific Ocean, surviving a shark attack and cyclone on the year-long, 8,000-mile (12,875km) trip from San Francisco to Australia.
Fairfax wrote separate books about his ocean crossings that were both published in the 1970s.

"He was a man of unbelievable strength and courage and confidence in everything he did," Tiffany Fairfax said. "He thought nature was a worthy challenge and he loved nature."

Fairfax used two different custom-made boats on the ocean journeys, she said, and navigated by the stars. He survived by eating up to eight pounds of fish a day and used a system to convert ocean water into drinking water.

"On the Pacific a shark took a big chunk of his arm" when he was spearing fish, Tiffany Fairfax said. "There you are on the Pacific Ocean and there's no hospital, and you need to row. He was an amazing, amazing human being."

John Fairfax enjoyed many other adventures, including a trip to the Amazon jungle and a stint as a pirate. He spoke five languages, loved to cook and regularly played the card game baccarat at Las Vegas casinos, his wife said.

Ex-girlfriend Cook, 73, who lives near London, remained lifelong friends with John Fairfax. "He's always been a gambler," she told the New York Times after his death. "He was going to the casino every night when I met him it was craps in those days. And at the end of the day, adventures are a kind of gamble, aren't they?"

His only immediate survivor is his wife of 31 years, who moved with him to Las Vegas in 1992 after a hurricane in Florida where they had lived.

Shin Gambira faces action by the authorities because he has 'repeatedly broken Buddhist monks' code of conduct'

Shin Gambira, a Burmese monk jailed for his role in protests in 2007 and released in a January amnesty, faces action by the authorities because he has "repeatedly broken Buddhist monks' code of conduct and the law", state newspapers reported.

The reports accused him of rejoining the religious order without requesting authorisation after 13 January amnesty, of being in the Magin Monastery, which has been sealed by the government, and breaking the locks of two other monasteries.

Monks from Magin, in the eastern suburbs of the main city of Rangoon, were involved in opposition activity under the military regime that ruled Burma for almost 50 years until a nominally civilian government took over in March last year.

The civilian government, while full of former generals, has initiated a series of political and economic reforms at a speed that has taken the outside world by surprise, although some observers remain sceptical of its motives.

Shin Gambira, 33, was a leader of the Alliance of All Burma Buddhist Monks that led a peaceful protest known as the Saffron Revolution in 2007, which the military put down with force.

The papers said the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee (SSMNC), the highest level of a state-sponsored Buddhist monks' organisation, had summoned Shin Gambira three times but he failed to show up, so the police were asked to bring him in on 10 February.

According to the newspapers, Shin Gambira had said in a statement to the SSMNC that he did not need permission to rejoin the order of monks so he would not ask for it.

The United States, which has made the freeing of political prisoners one of its conditions for easing sanctions on Burma imposed when the junta was in power, had expressed concern at his brief detention this month.

Shin Gambira was arrested in November 2007 and sentenced to 68 years in jail. He said after his release that he had been badly treated, both physically and mentally, during his interrogation and in jail.

In his statement to the SSMNC, Shin Gambira had also objected to the body's ordering another prominent monk, Shwenyawa Sayadaw, to leave his monastery for political activities including giving a speech at the opening of an office of the opposition National League for Democracy party of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Aung Kyaw Kyaw, the elder brother of Shin Gambira, told Reuters they had no news of the developments reported in the state press.

"I last met him yesterday evening. I heard he had gone to have lunch with a monk friend of his this morning," he said.

Buddhist monks have a long tradition of standing up to authorities in Burma. They were often at the forefront of opposition to British colonial rule, which ended in 1948.

Occupy Washington, DC began in April, 2010 as the October2011 Movement and went public on June 6, 2011 telling Americans that history was knocking.  The movement was inspired by actions in Egypt, Spain, Greece and we expressed solidarity with international movements in an open letter published in Al Jazeera.   Its initial project was the Occupation of Freedom Plaza which began on October 6, 2011 and linked corporatism and militarism on the beginning of the 11^th year of the Afghanistan War and the first year of the federal austerity budget.  

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Trade deficit touched $18.5bn as fuel imports rose and exports tumbled due to strong yen and slump in demand in Europe.

Live-fire drills conducted near disputed Yellow Sea border despite threats of retaliation from Pyongyang.

Trade deficit touched $18.5bn as fuel imports rose and exports tumbled due to strong yen and slump in demand in Europe.