The People's Record

Aam Aadmi Party workers today protested outside residences of Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit and local MLAs on the issues of rising prices of power and water, and women’s safety in the national capital. 
May 19, 2013

While demonstrating outside the CM’s residence, some workers were detained and sent to Tuglak Road Police Station, a statement released by Aam Aadmi Party said. AAP workers claimed that a number of volunteers were injured during police action at the time of the protest. 

“In Shahdara, AAP volunteers, including several women and children, were hurt when they were protesting outside Congress MLA Narendra Nath’s residence. Around 20 volunteers were detained by the police outside his house and taken to Farsh Bazar Station,” the statement said. 

When AAP volunteers tried to gherao local MLA and senior Congress leader Kiran Walia’s house in Malviya Nagar, they were detained by police and taken to local police station, it said. Workers, who went to meet area MLA in Gandhi Nagar, were arrested and taken to Kalyanpuri Police station when they tried to confront their MLA, the statement said. MLAs refused to meet the AAP workers, the statement added.

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Aam Aadmi Party is an Indian political party launched on 26 November 2012. ‘Aam Aadmi’ in Hindi means ‘Common Man’. The name was adopted by the Party as it aims to represent common Wo/man of India and to bring political power back into the people’s hands. One of the party’s primary vision is to realize the dream of ‘SWARAJ’ or ‘Self-governance’ that Mahatma Gandhi had envisaged for a free India - where the power of governance and rights of democracy will be in the hands of the people of India.

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Meet The Red Brigade: formed in November 2011 to fight back against a growing number of sexual attacks on women in the city of Lucknow, India

The male tormentor of the young women of the Madiyav slum did not spot the danger until it was too late. One moment he was taunting them with sexual suggestions and provocations; the next they had hold of his arms and legs and had hoisted him into the air.

Then the beating began. Some of the young women lightly used their fists, others took off their shoes and hit him with those. When it was over, they let him limp away to nurse his wounds, certain that he had learned an important lesson: don’t push your luck with the Red Brigade.

Named for their bright red outfits, the Red Brigade was formed in November 2011 as a self-defense group for young women suffering sexual abuse in the northern Indian city of Lucknow, 300 miles south-east of Delhi. Galvanised by the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi last December and the nationwide protests that followed against a rising tide of rapes, they are now gaining in confidence.

From a core membership of 15, ranging in age from 11 to 25, they now have more than 100 members with a simple message for the men who have made their lives a misery: they will no longer tolerate being groped, gawped at and worse. Their activities are a lesson in empowerment.

Men who fall foul of the Red Brigade can first expect a visit and a warning. Sometimes the Red Brigade will ask the police to get involved, but if all else fails they take matters into their own hands. Their leader, 25-year-old teacher Usha Vishwakarma, has her own experience of the daily danger faced by many young women in the country. She was just 18 when a fellow teacher tried to rape her. “He grabbed me and put his hands round me and tried to open my belt and trousers,” says Usha, sitting in the bare-brick front room of her small house. “But I was saved by my jeans because they were too tight for him to open, and that gave me a chance to fight, so I kicked him in the sensitive place and pushed him down and ran out of the door.”

No one at the school took her accusations seriously, telling her to forget it and stop causing trouble. The experience left her traumatized and for two years she did nothing. But little by little her confidence came back. In 2009 she set up her own small school for local girls in an outbuilding next to her family home. Yet all around her, she says, she saw more and more young women suffering the same abuse she had faced. And it was threatening to wreck the chances of her young female students.

“Parents were telling girls to stay in their homes so there would be no incidents. They said, ‘if you go to school, boys will be troubling you, so stay home and there will be no sexual violence’,” says Vishwakarma. “But we said no, and we decided to form a group to fight for ourselves. We decided we would not just complain; we would take a lead and fight for ourselves.” They bought red kameez (shirts) and black salwar (trousers) and began to plan the fightback. “We chose red because it means danger and black for protest,” says Vishwakarma.

There is much to fight back against. “It is in the minds of men that girls are objects and it has been like that always,” says Vishwakarma. “Religion shows women as very powerless and that whoever is strong can do anything.”

They have started martial arts training so that the men do not have a physical advantage over them. Pooja, Vishwakarma’s 18-year-old sister, laughs as she recalls the reaction of the boy they grabbed in the street when his taunts became too much. “We all stopped and turned round and we surrounded him and grabbed his arms and legs and he thought it was a joke, but we were not kidding and four of us lifted him in the air and the others started to hit him with their shoes and fists,” she says.

The rough justice the Red Brigade metes out might seem extreme to western sensibilities, but many Indian women are making it clear that they are no longer prepared to put up with endemic abuse. That much is clear from the crime figures: reports of molestation in Delhi are up 590% year on year and rape reports by 147%. The rape cases have hit tourist numbers, which were down 25% in the first three months of the year – 35% fewer women are travelling to India. The Red Brigade say sexual abuse is a part of daily life for young women like them. They all have stories of abuse, attempted rapes and daily harassment. “This is what happens in India,” says 16-year-old Laxmi, one of Vishwakarma’s lieutenants. “These things happen all the time. All of us know this, so don’t let anyone say otherwise. This is why we have formed the Red Brigade.”

Seventeen-year-old Preeti Verma nods in agreement. Her family are too poor to have a toilet in the house, so she has to go out into the fields, she says. Every time she went out, the man in the neighbouring house threw stones at her to try to scare her into jumping up. “He wanted to see my body,” she says. “I told him: ‘What are you doing? You are shameless, don’t you have a mother and sister in your house?’ But he replied that his mother is for his father, his sister is for her husband and that I was for him.” She told Vishwakarma, and the man received a visit from the Red Brigade and another from the police. She has had no trouble from him since.

“We’ve caught a lot of men recently,” says 17-year-old Sufia Hashmi. “I joined up because men always used to pass comments on me and touch my body, but now we beat them the men cannot do anything and they run away. You feel powerful and you feel good.”

On the way back to the slum, the rickshaws pass a public park and for a moment these tough young women show themselves for what they really are – children forced to grow up fast. They beg and plead to stop. “Please, please,” they say, their eyes gleaming in excitement. Shrieking gleefully, they race off towards the swings, slides and roundabouts. Later they stroll back through the market, eating ice-creams, heading for their homes. The sun is low in the sky, the shadows long. The men watch sullenly as they pass. No one risks a word.

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Saw this on Al Jazeera this morning. I’m sure it’s gone around Tumblr in some form before.

Farmers protest against corporate power plant & corrupt government partnership hits 1000th day
May 17, 2013

“Lathi maar maar ke utha lehale anshan wahe/ daktar sahib soochna pahuchain naye mukhyamantri se bataiye da/ hum aapan zamin na dewai/ hame na chahi kuch tumhara.” (Translated: Police beat protesting farmers and remanded them/ We heard a new CM is coming to hear us/ Tell him we won’t give up our land/ We want nothing from you.)

These defiant lines in a created mix of Bhojpuri and Hindi are few of the many composed and sung by Anarkali (52), over the last three years. Her songs are meant to inspire a few hundred fellow farmers, who sit attentively with their farming tools each day, listening to her after the day’s work. On Friday, they assembled at Kachari village in the Trans-Yamuna region of this district, for the 1000th consecutive day. A maha-panchayat of villages was held to mark the occasion.

Under the Purnvas Kisan Kalyan Sahayta Samiti (PKKSS), these farmers have been protesting the proposed 1980 MW Karchhana power plant. Through songs, slogans and speeches about government corruption & corporate land development, the farmers wish to keep up the momentum for their daily assemblage. “We apprise them of their rights, how the government cheated us. They are encouraged not to fall for bribes or be intimidated by threats. This is not compulsory yet the farmers come daily,” said Raj Bahaur Patel, president, PKKSS.

The project was conceived in 2007 under the Bahujan Samaj Party government and about 2,500 bighas of land was acquired from 2,286 farmers in eight villages — Devari, Kachari, Katka-Medhra, Dehli, Dohlipur, Bagesar, Kachara and Bhitar. However, the project, handed over to an undertaking of Jaypee Group in 2009, could never take off due to consistent protests by farmers over compensation, leaving one farmer murdered by police repression.

Last April, the Allahabad High Court allowed the farmers’ writ petitions and stalled the project. The Court stipulated that farmers who had received compensation for their land should either return the money and take back the land or willingly hand over the land for the project. Around 140 farmers did not accept compensation. Those who did are in no condition to repay the amount, causing an impasse which the administration is struggling to break through. Ever since the initial violence gripped the area, the protests have been peaceful, but the farmers complain they are being intimidated by local goons and officials to give up their land and discontinue the protests.

“We will shoot you and your family. Just let the power plant come up you will be taught a lesson, they tell us,” says Sukhdevi, 65, one of the many protesters.

Many of these threats also come from petty politicians, says Mr. Patel. “They approached us for a compromise, first with bribes. When we declined, they have resorted to fear tactics.” Consequently, the farmers have written to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Chief Minister’s Office, listing their apprehensions and demands. Also, in two letters dated August 8, 2012 and October 10, 2012, the farmers mentioned the threats to their lives, while also promising that they were ready to return the compensation but in installments and on their terms.

When Mr. Patel was called in to receive the response on April 15, the special land acquisition officer O.P Singh only inquired about the land possession of each farmer, completely ignoring the threats to the farmers’ lives. The Hindu has a copy of the document.

The farmers have been demanding: restoration of the fertility of their lands, compensation for the loss of farming over the last five years and losses suffered at the hands of police action during protests, an official inquiry into the violence & threats made against them.

Despite Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav announcing that the government would quash all FIRs filed against protesting farmers, eight criminal cases registered against farmers in Karchhana still stand. The farmers, who also reported that their land was wrongfully claimed to be barren, have filed an RTI into it. However, they have received no response yet.

Unlike previous years, when the farmers abandoned farming on the proposed site, they have engaged in some cultivation this season. Yet they remain fearful of violent retribution by goons and intermediaries. “We live in uncertainty. What if they destroy our crops and start the plant? We cannot afford further losses,” says a farmer.

The proposed land includes a large portion of the common property resources in the villages, like the ponds, rearing grounds, connecting paths and grain storage houses.

Notably, the region is turning into a hot-bed for famers’ protests against power plants. In Bara, while farmers have given up on their demands for higher compensation, they are on the verge of launching a movement against the excess extraction of water from the Yamuna.

The farmers have also demonstrated that “men of authority” are trying to create a rift among them to break down their movement. “They are creating false news that there is in-fighting among the farmers,” says Mr. Patel, citing a news report in a highly circulated Hindi daily.

Source

Dr. Vandana Shiva: the “GOLDEN RICE” hoax - when public relations replaces science to promote a technology for creating Vitamin A deficiency
May 15, 2013

Golden rice has been heralded as the miracle cure for malnutrition and hunger of which 800m members of the human community suffer.  Herbicide resistant and toxin producing genetically engineered plants can be objectionable because of their ecological and social costs.  But who could possibly object to rice engineered to produce vitamin A, a deficiency found in nearly 3 million children, largely in the Third World?

As remarked by Mary Lou Guerinot, the author of the Commentary on Vitamin A rice in Science, one can only hope that this application of plant genetic engineering to ameliorate human misery without regard to short term profit will restore this technology to political acceptability. Unfortunately, Vitamin A rice is a hoax, and will bring further dispute to plant genetic engineering where public relations exercises seem to have replaced science in promotion of untested, unproven and unnecessary technology.

The problem is that vitamin A rice will not remove vitamin A deficiency (VAD).  It will seriously aggravate it.  It is a technology that fails in its promise. Currently, it is not even known how much vitamin JA the genetically engineered rice will produce.  The goal is 33.3% micrograms/100g of rice.  Even if this goal is reached after a few years, it will be totally ineffective in removing VAD.

Since the daily average requirement of vitamin A is 750 micrograms of vitamin A and 1 serving contains 30g of rice according to dry weight basis, vitamin A rice would only provide 9.9 micrograms which is 1.32% of the required allowance.  Even taking the 100g figure of daily consumption of rice used in the technology transfer paper would only provide 4.4% of the RDA.

In order to meet the full needs of 750 micrograms of vitamin A from rice, an adult would have to consume 2 kg 272g of rice per day.  This implies that one family member would consume the entire family ration of 10 kg. from the PDS in 4 days to meet vitaminA needs through “Golden rice”.

This is a recipe for creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.

Besides creating vitamin A deficiency, vitamin A rice will also create deficiency in other micronutrients and nutrients.  Raw milled rice has a low content of Fat (0.5g/100g).  Since fat is necessary for vitamin A uptake, this will aggravate vitamin A deficiency.  It also has only 6.8g/100g of protein, which means less carrier molecules.  It has only 0.7g/100g of iron, which plays a vital role in the conversion of beta-carotene (precursor of vitamin A found in plant sources) to vitamin A. Superior Alternatives exist and are effective.

A far more efficient route to removing vitamin A deficiency is biodiversity conservation and propagation of naturally vitamin A rich plants in agriculture and diets.

The following is a list of sources rich in vitamin A which are used commonly in Indian foods. (microgram/100g)

(Amaranth leaves) Chauli saag= 266-1,166 -

(Coriander leaves) – Dhania = 1,166-1,333 

(Cabbage) Bandh gobi = 217 

(Curry leaves)-Curry patta = 1,333 

(Drumstick leaves)-Saijan patta1 = 283 

(Fenugreek leaves)-Methi-ka-saag = 450 

(Radish leaves)-Mooli-ka-saag = 750 

(Mint)-Pudhina = 300 

(Spinach)-Palak saag = 600 

(Carrot)-Gajar=217-434 

(Pumpkin (yellow))-Kaddu = 100-120 

(Mango (ripe))-Aam = 500 

(Jackfruit)-Kathal = 54 

(Orange)-Santra = 35 

(Tomato (ripe))-Tamatar = 32 

(Milk (cow, buffalo))-Doodh = 50-60 

(Butter)-Makkhan = 720-1,200 

(Egg (hen))-Anda = 300-400 

(Liver (Goat, sheep))-Kalegi = 6,600 - 10,000 

Cod liver oil = 10,000 - 100,000

In spite of the diversity of plants evolved and bred for their rich vitamin  A content, a report of the Major Science Academies of the World - Royal Society, U.K., National Academy of Sciences of the USA, The Third World Academy of Science, Indian National Science Academy, Mexican Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Brazilian Academy of Sciences - on Transgenic Plants and World Agriculture has stated, Vitamin A deficiency causes half a million children to become partially or totally blind each year.

Traditional breeding methods have been unsuccessful in producing crops containing a high vitamin A concentration and most national authorities rely on expensive and complicated supplementation programs to address the problem.  Researchers have introduced three new genes into rice, two from daffodils and one from a microorganism.  The transgenic rice exhibits an increased production of beta-carotene as a precursor to vitamin A and the seed in yellow in colour. Such yellow, or golden rice, may be a useful tool to help treat the problem of vitamin A deficiency in young children living in the tropics.

It appears as if the world’s top scientists suffer a more severe form of blindness than children in poor countries.  The statement that “traditional breeding has been unsuccessful in producing crops high in vitamin A” is not true given the diversity of plants and crops that Third World farmers, especially women have bred and used which are rich sources of vitamin A such as coriander, amaranth, carrot, pumpkin, mango, jackfruit.

It is also untrue that vitamin A rice will lead to increased production of beta-carotene.   Even if the target of 33.3 microgram of  vitamin A in 100g of rice is achieved, it will be only 2.8% of beta-carotene we can obtain from amaranth leaves 2.4% of beta-carotene obtained from coriander leaves, curry leaves and drumstick leaves.  Even the World Bank has admitted that rediscovering and use of local plants and conservation of vitamin A rich green leafy vegetables and fruits have dramatically reduced VAD threatened children over the past 20 years in very cheap and efficient ways.  Women in Bengal use more than 200 varieties of field greens. Over a 3 million people have benefited greatly from a food based project for removing VAD by increasing vitamin A availability through home gardens.  The higher the diversity crops the better the uptake of pro-vitamin A.

The reason there is vitamin A deficiency in India in spite of the rich biodiversity a base and indigenous knowledge base in India is because the Green Revolution technologies wiped out biodiversity by converting mixed cropping systems to monocultures of wheat and rice and by spreading the use of herbicides which destroy field greens.

In spite of effective and proven alternatives, a technology transfer agreement has been signed between the Swiss Government and the Government of India for the transfer of genetically engineered vitamin A rice to India.

The ICAR, ICMR, ICDS, USAIUD, UNICEF, WHO have been identified as potential partners.  The breeding and transformation is to be carried out at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, Central Rice Research Institute, Cuttack and Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana and University of Delhi, South Campus. The Indian varieties in which the vitamin A traits are expected to be engineered have been identified as IR 64, Pusa Basmati, PR 114 and ASD 16.

Dr. M.S. Swaminathan has been identified as “God father” to ensuring public acceptance of genetically engineered rice.  DBT & ICAR are also potential partners for guaranteeing public acceptance and steady progress of the project.

Genetically engineered vitamin A rice will aggravate this destruction since it is part of an industrial agriculture, intensive input package. It will also lead to major water scarcity since it is a water intensive crop and displaces water prudent sources of vitamin A.

The first step in the technology transfer of vitamin A rice requires a need assessment and an assessment of technology availability.  One assessment shows that vitamin A rice fails to pass the need test. The technology availability issue is related to whether the various elements and methods used for the construction of transgenic crop plants are covered by intellectual property rights.  Licenses for these rights need to be obtained before a product can be commercialized.  The Cornell based ISAAA (International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Application) has been identified as the partner for ensuring technology availability by ensuring technology availability by having material transfer agreements signed between the representative authority of the ICAR and the “owners” of the technology, Prof. I. Potrykus and Prof. P.  Beyer.

In addition, Novartis and Kerin Breweries have patents on the genes used as constructs for the vitamin A rice. At a public hearing on Biotechnology at U.S. Congress on 29th June 2000, Astra-Zeneca stated they would be giving away royalty free licenses for the development of “Golden rice”.

At a workshop organized by the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, Dr. Barry of Monsanto’s Rice Genome initiative announced that it will provide royalty-free licenses for all its technologies that can help the further development of “golden rice”.

Hence these gene giants Novartis, Astra-Zeneca and Monsanto are claiming exclusive ownership to the basic patents related to rice research.  Further, neither Monsanto nor Astra - Zeneca said they will give up their patents on rice - they are merely giving royalty free licenses to public sector scientists for development of “golden rice”.  This is an arrangement for a public subsidy to corporate giants for R&D since they do not have the expertise or experience with rice breeding which public institutions have.

Not giving up the patents, but merely giving royalty free licenses implies that the corporations like Monsanto would ultimately like to collect royalties from farmers for rice varieties developed by public sector research systems.  Monsanto has stated that it expects long term gains from these IPR arrangements, which implies markets in rice as “intellectual property” which cannot be saved or exchanged for seed.  The real test for Monsanto would be its declaration of giving up any patent claims to rice now and in the future and joining the call to remove plants and biodiversity out of TRIPS.  Failing such an undertaking by Monsanto the announcement that Monsanto giving royalty free licenses for development of vitamin A rice like the rice itself can only be taken as a hoax to establish monopoly over rice production, and reduce rice farmers of India into bio-serfs.

While the complicated technology transfer package of “Golden Rice” will not solve vitamin A problems in India, it is a very effective strategy for corporate take over of rice production, using the public sector as a Trojan horse.

Source

Photos Source

TW: Rape, Violence: 4-year-old Indian girl raped, left with severe brain injuries in critical condition
April 24, 2013

A 4-year-old Indian girl who was raped last week is currently in critical condition, having sustained severe brain injuries after allegedly being suffocated.

The unnamed child was reportedly raped in her village in Madhya Pradesh on April 17, according to Press Trust of India.

The girl’s family found the child, who went missing on Wednesday, the next morning lying unconscious and profusely bleeding near a crematorium in her village, according to The Times of India. She had lacerations, tears and bruises on her body, and had allegedly been suffocated, which caused serious brain injuries.

Firoz Khan, a 35-year-old welder, is accused of raping the 4-year-old. His alleged accomplice is accused of using chocolate to lure the girl from her home, NDTV reports.

“The condition of the 4-year-old child, who was found unconscious in a field in Ghansur town of MP, is still critical. She is totally unconscious from the time she was brought to Nagpur,” a doctor told The Hindu. “We have done all the examinations including MRI brain and EEG which indicates gross damage to her brain. Her brain’s functioning has reduced to an abnormal level. This is hypoxic brain damage which means inability of brain to work due lack of oxygen supply.”

“She has been put on a life support system and is being treated by a team of senior doctors. Nothing else can be said about her situation now” he added.

Police are still searching for Khan, who may have left the country, according to NDTV. The other suspect has been arrested.

News of this horrific incident comes in the midst of fury over the rape and torture of a 5-year-old girl in the Indian capital . The girl was found Wednesday in a New Delhi apartment building and doctors discovered a candle and a bottle of hair oil inside her little body.

Hundreds of protesters have taken to the streets in the wake of the crime, alleging that police did not respond to the tragedy.

“The police must be held accountable for their shocking levels of apathy. They urgently need to review police processes to ensure that all cases of rape and sexual violence – not just those highlighted by the media – are fully and promptly investigated,” G. Ananthapadmanabhan, who heads the India chapter of the human rights group Amnesty International, said, according to the Associated Press. “Those who fail to do their job must be held accountable.”

Two suspects — aged 19 and 24 — have been arrested in connection with the rape, according to the report.

Source

Today, after seeing so much idiotic rhetoric, unhelpful conspiracy theories & bizarre distasteful segments in the news, I just needed some Arundhati Roy.

All of these have been posted onto our Facebook page for sharing there. Please like & favorite the page if you haven’t already.

On New Delhi street, protest simmers nonstop
March 31, 2013

The massive protests that swept India after the gang rape of a paramedical student in the capital last year may seem to have disappeared from the headlines here.

The young woman who was assaulted died; the government gave her family a new apartment and financial compensation. The accused are on trial, and a new law has toughened the penalties for sexual assault.

But on one street in New Delhi, the movement — dubbed the 16 December Revolution after the date the gang rape occurred — is still alive, kept in the public eye by bandanna-wearing, placard-wielding activists who sleep in plastic tents and hold daily candlelight vigils.

Jantar Mantar, the capital’s official protest street, is the place where much of the anger and dissent in this teeming democracy finds a voice. On Friday, the anti-rape protesters sat in the rain next to people demanding cleaner rivers, affirmative action, pension funds, disability grants and a corruption-free government.

When it comes to grievances, India is a buffet. And anybody with a cause can find slogan-shouting time and space at Jantar Mantar — as powerful an advertisement for free speech as Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, only more crowded and more littered.

As public outrage over corruption and sexual violence grew in the past two years, it appeared for a while as if the India Gate boulevard that runs past Parliament, the prime minister’s office and the president’s residence would again become the demonstration hub it had been until the 1980s. But the protest-wary government imposed curfews on India Gate and herded activists back into the tiny street, named Jantar Mantar after the nearby 18th-century astronomical observatory of the same name.

Protesters describe Jantar Mantar evocatively. “Temple of democracy,” one said. Another likened it to the bell that citizens rang to alert the king of their grievances in olden times. One man said it was like the “anger palace” of the Hindu epics to which queens withdrew to indicate to the king that they were sulking.

But Ram Shankar Ojha, 56, who was protesting the condition of the city’s polluted Yamuna River, said the street could also be seen as “a jailhouse for protesters.”

“The government has set aside this street for us to come, shout, vent our anger and leave,” he said. “The government wants to contain our anger within Jantar Mantar so that it does not spill out into the rest of the city.”

Anti-rape protesters said they will not leave the street until all those accused in the Dec. 16 incident, including the juvenile defendant, are hanged.

“The so-called fast-track court is taking too long,” said Mohammad Faiz Khan, 32. “Today it is three months since the woman died.”

In another tent, a mother was protesting on behalf of her daughter, who she said was raped by a policeman in the northern state of Punjab in 2010.

“The police have not even filed a complaint,” said Mahinder Kaur, 60. “It has been nearly three years.” Buoyed by the anti-rape protests in the capital, Kaur and her daughter have camped in Jantar Mantar since January. Activists helped her write letters to the government’s human rights panel and women’s commission.

Policemen stand around on the street all day, keeping an eye on things & plainclothes intelligence officers speak to protesters in the evening and take notes.

Meanwhile, ideas and activists circulate and sometimes meld.

Several auto-rickshaw drivers demanding speedier vehicle registration and a new fare schedule wore white caps bearing the slogan “I am the common man,” the signature protest prop of the anti-corruption movement that began in Jantar Mantar two years ago.

One driver said he had volunteered at the office of the anti-corruption crusader Arvind Kejriwal, who is now on a hunger strike in a distant slum to protest electricity prices. Kejriwal was invited to speak a few days ago at the Jantar Mantar protest tent of activists demanding a separate state for the ethnic Gorkha community in eastern India.

“He said he supports our cause for a separate state because of our distinct Gorkha ethnic and linguistic identity,” said Bhushan Rai, 37.

A law student protesting against rape said he had also taken part in the anti-corruption drive: “In a way, the anti-corruption movement gave me the first exposure to activism, then the rape protests took place and I went to that, too,” said Mohit Ranjan, 21. “I am still here because I don’t want that spirit to die out.”

Source

The People’s Record News Update: this week on our dying planet
March 17, 2013

• In Brazil, environmental authorities in Rio de Janeiro have launched a huge clean-up operation after an estimated 65 tonnes of dead fish filled up the 2016 Olympic rowing lake.

• Greenpeace released a report on pollution in India that indicated one Indian coal power plants kills 120,000 people a year. Also, the report on pollution in the country warns emissions may cause 20 million new asthma cases a year.

• In China, more dead pigs have been recovered from the Huangpu river in Shanghai following the discovery of more than 2,800 floating carcasses earlier this week. The find brings the total to more than 6,600 carcasses since last Friday.

• In Spain, a majestic sperm whale has been found to have died due to swallowing 40 lbs of plastic. The dead sperm whale that washed up on Spain’s south coast had swallowed 17kg of plastic waste dumped into the sea by farmers tending greenhouses that produce tomatoes and other vegetables for British supermarkets.
  
  Scientists were amazed to find the 4.5 tonne whale had swallowed 59 different bits of plastic – most of it thick transparent sheeting used to build greenhouses in southern Almeria and Granada. A clothes hanger, an ice-cream tub and bits of mattress were also found. The plastic had eventually blocked the animal’s stomach and killed it.

• Big Pharma on Friday won the first round of its fight to defeat a European proposal to ban a trio of commonly used pesticides suspected of killing honeybees. The closely watched measure, which calls for a European Union-wide moratorium on three types of neonicotinoid pesticides, failed to secure the needed votes from the 27 EU member states today, a result cheered by the manufacturers of the chemicals.

Capitalism isn’t working - look at what the private industries who hold all the power in our society are doing to the living things on this planet. We need to restructure the way we organize ourselves and we need to do it fast. This is all just so overwhelming.

Eco-socialist picture on Facebook for sharing.

anarcho-queer:

New York Millionaire On Trial For Keeping A Slave In Her Mansion

Millionaire socialite Annie George, 40, went on trial Tuesday for allegedly keeping an undocumented immigrant as a “slave” in her upstate New York mansion.

According to CBS 6 in Albany, Valsamma Mathai, 49, testified Tuesday that she was held in the 30,000 square foot, 26-bedroom Llenroc Mansion in Rexford, New York for six and a half years as she worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and slept in a walk-in closet.

Mathai, an undocumented immigrant from India, said she was picked up at a New York bus station by George’s late husband Mathai Kolath George, who spoke her native tongue and offered a job that would pay $1,000 per month — a significant raise over the $100 per month she was making.

When she arrived, however, Mathai claims she did not have her passport or visa, and soon discovered she wasn’t allowed to leave.

It wasn’t until the National Human Trafficking Resource Center received a tip from the woman’s son, who prosecutors said recorded a conversation with George, that agents came to her rescue. A criminal complaint was filed last March.

George is facing a charge of harboring an undocumented immigrant, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

That the worst thing they could charge this woman with is ‘harboring an undocumented immigrant,’ & that that’s a crime that carries a potential sentence of 10 years in prison is baffling. This woman should face criminal prosecution, but not for giving shelter to another human being.

How ‘bout false imprisonment or kidnapping or torture or extortion? What does it say about our criminal justice system that HARBORING AN UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANT is worse and/or more prosecutable than all those other things?

Indian feminists/activists respond to Harvard kids attempting to help the less fortunate ‘third world’ feminists
February 25, 2013

Globally, from the U.S. to the developing world, rape and other forms of violence against women remain at shockingly high levels. Focusing on the horrifying case of a 23-year-old Indian student who was gang-raped and beaten to death in Delhi in December, the Harvard College Women’s Center announced it would create a Beyond Gender Equality task force, “convened to offer recommendations to India and other South Asian countries in the wake of the New Delhi gang rape and murder.”

The group ignored the long history of Indian activists themselves fighting to end rape and sexual violence—including recent mass protests of South Asian women and men calling for a systemic fight against rape. And the Harvardites had nothing to say about the ample evidence of the problem of rape in the U.S.—from the sickening gang rape and subsequent cover-up at Steubenville High School in Ohio, to the systematic downplaying of rape and sexual assault at Amherst College and other universities.

In response to this “white (wo)man’s burden” take on the issue of sexual violence in South Asia, a group Indian feminists wrote the following response, first published at Kafila.org, detailing their own years of work fighting to end rape and gain justice sexual assault victims.

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Dear sisters (and brothers?) at Harvard,
WE’RE A group of Indian feminists and we are delighted to learn that the Harvard community—without doubt one of the most learned in the world—has seen fit to set up a policy task force entitled “Beyond Gender Equality” and that you are preparing to offer recommendations to India (and other South Asian countries) in the wake of the New Delhi gang rape and murder.

Not since the days of Katherine Mayo have American women—and American feminists—felt such a concern for their less privileged Third World sisters. Mayo’s concern, at that time, was to ensure that the Indian state (then the colonial state) did not leave Indian women in the lurch, at the mercy of their men, and that it retained power and the rule of the just.

Yours, we see, is to work towards ensuring that steps are put in place that can help the Indian state in its implementation of the recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee, a responsibility the Indian state must take up.

This is clearly something that we, Indian feminists and activists who have been involved in the women’s movement here for several decades, are incapable of doing, and it was with a sense of overwhelming relief that we read of your intention to step into this breach.

You might be pleased to know that one of us, a lawyer who led the initiative to put pressure on the Justice Verma Committee to have a public hearing with women’s groups, even said in relief, when she heard of your plans, that she would now go on holiday and take a plane ride to see the Everest.

Indeed, we are all relieved, for now we know that our efforts will not have been in vain: the oral evidence provided by 82 activists and organizations to the Justice Verma Committee—and which we believe substantially contributed to the framing of their report—will now be in safe American hands!

Perhaps you are aware that the Indian state has put in place an “Ordinance on Sexual Assault” that ignores many recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee? If not, we would be pleased to furnish you a copy of the Ordinance, as well as a chart prepared by us, which details which recommendations have been accepted and which not.

This may be useful in your efforts to advise our government. One of the greatest things about sisterhood is that it is so global—feminism has built such strong international connections, such that whenever our First World sisters see that we are incapable of dealing with problems in our countries, they immediately step in to help us out and provide us with much needed guidance and support. We are truly grateful for this.

Perhaps you will allow us to repay the favor, and next time President Obama wants to put in place legislation to do with abortion or the Equal Rights Amendment, we can step in and help, and, from our small bit of experience in these fields, recommend what the United States can do.

Source (with signatures)

TW: Rape, violence - A rape a minute, a thousand corpses a year: Hate crimes in America
January 24, 2013

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren’t that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large. Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they’re everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern.

There is, however, a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a case involving a celebrity or lurid details in a particular case get a lot of attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this country, in other countries, on every continent including Antarctica, constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.

If you’d rather talk about bus rapes than gang rapes, there’s the rape of a developmentally disabled woman on a Los Angeles bus in November and the kidnapping of an autistic 16-year-old on the regional transit train system in Oakland, California — she was raped repeatedly by her abductor over two days this winter — and there was a gang rape of multiple women on a bus in Mexico City recently, too. While I was writing this, I read that another female bus-rider was kidnapped in India and gang-raped all night by the bus driver and five of his friends who must have thought what happened in New Delhi was awesome.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

Here I want to say one thing: though virtually all the perpetrators of such crimes are men, that doesn’t mean all men are violent. Most are not. In addition, men obviously also suffer violence, largely at the hands of other men, and every violent death, every assault is terrible. But the subject here is the pandemic of violence by men against women, both intimate violence and stranger violence.

What We Don’t Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Gender

There’s so much of it. We could talk about the assault and rape of a 73-year-old in Manhattan’s Central Park last September, or the recent rape of a four-year-old and an 83-year-old in Louisiana, or the New York City policeman who was arrested in October for what appeared to be serious plans to kidnap, rape, cook, and eat a woman, any woman, because the hate wasn’t personal (though maybe it was for the San Diego man who actually killed and cooked his wife in November and the man from New Orleans who killed, dismembered, and cooked his girlfriend in 2005).

Those are all exceptional crimes, but we could also talk about quotidian assaults, because though a rape is reported only every 6.2 minutes in this country, the estimated total is perhaps five times as high. Which means that there may be very nearly a rape a minute in the U.S. It all adds up to tens of millions of rape victims.

We could talk about high-school- and college-athlete rapes, or campus rapes, to which university authorities have been appallingly uninterested in responding in many cases, including that high school in Steubenville, Notre Dame University, Amherst College, and many others. We could talk about the escalating pandemic of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment in the U.S. military, where Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta estimated that there were 19,000 sexual assaults on fellow soldiers in 2010 alone and that the great majority of assailants got away with it, though four-star general Jeffrey Sinclair was indicted in September for “a slew of sex crimes against women.”

Never mind workplace violence, let’s go home. So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over 1,000 homicides of that kind a year — meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular terror. (Another way to put it: the more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides since 9/11 exceed the number of deaths of victims on that day and all American soldiers killed in the “war on terror.”) If we talked about crimes like these and why they are so common, we’d have to talk about what kinds of profound change this society, or this nation, or nearly every nation needs. If we talked about it, we’d be talking about masculinity, or male roles, or maybe patriarchy, and we don’t talk much about that.

Instead, we hear that American men commit murder-suicides — at the rate of about 12 a week — because the economy is bad, though they also do it when the economy is good; or that those men in India murdered the bus-rider because the poor resent the rich, while other rapes in India are explained by how the rich exploit the poor; and then there are those ever-popular explanations: mental problems and intoxicants — and for jocks, head injuries. The latest spin is that lead exposure was responsible for a lot of our violence, except that both genders are exposed and one commits most of the violence. The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.

Someone wrote a piece about how white men seem to be the ones who commit mass murders in the U.S. and the (mostly hostile) commenters only seemed to notice the white part. It’s rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible: “Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family.”

Still, the pattern is plain as day. We could talk about this as a global problem, looking at the epidemic of assault, harassment, and rape of women in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that has taken away the freedom they celebrated during the Arab Spring — and led some men there to form defense teams to help counter it — or the persecution of women in public and private in India from “Eve-teasing” to bride-burning, or “honor killings” in South Asia and the Middle East, or the way that South Africa has become a global rape capital, with an estimated 600,000 rapes last year, or how rape has been used as a tactic and “weapon” of war in Mali, Sudan, and the Congo, as it was in the former Yugoslavia, or the pervasiveness of rape and harassment in Mexico and the femicide in Juarez, or the denial of basic rights for women in Saudi Arabia and the myriad sexual assaults on immigrant domestic workers there, or the way that the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case in the United States revealed what impunity he and others had in France, and it’s only for lack of space I’m leaving out Britain and Canada and Italy (with its ex-prime minister known for his orgies with the underaged), Argentina and Australia and so many other countries.

Full article

This is a really great piece. All of these incidents of violence are disgusting & as a woman, really scary. One rape nearly every minute is simply unacceptable. When they are reported, victims rarely get justice… no matter where in the world it happens. Our patriarchal, violent society has given life to this outrageous rape culture, & it’s putting women in danger worldwide.

TW: Violence - Two more horrifying gang rape cases in India over the weekend
January 15, 2013

Seven men gang rape bus passenger in New Delhi

In an incident eerily similar to a sexual assault that sent shock waves worldwide, Indian police say a woman was gang-raped over the weekend by seven men after she boarded a bus at night.

Police have arrested all seven suspects, including the bus driver, after the alleged Friday night attack in the Gurdaspur district of Punjab state.

Just like a gang rape in New Delhi that sparked international outrage last month, the new attack occurred after the woman got on a bus.

The bus sped past her stop, police said. By that time, the woman was the only passenger.

The bus driver and his helper then took the married 29-year-old woman to an undisclosed address where five others joined the two men and raped her throughout the night, police said.

“They threatened me with a sharp edged weapon and did wrong things with me,” the victim told CNN’s sister station, CNN-IBN. “They kept me confined all through the night and forced me to do what they want.”

The next day, the suspects dropped her off at her village, where she informed her family and alerted police, according to authorities.

Source

Passenger gang raped, killed, hanged from a tree in Bhagalpur

A woman who got down from a Delhi-bound train in Bhagalpur district, was gang-raped, killed and her body hanged from a tree in a mango orchard.

Police said the 32-year-old victim, who was a passenger of the Brahmaputra Mail that was travelling to the national capital, was dragged to the mango orchard and gang-raped by unidentified persons after she alighted from the train between Vikramshila and Kahalgaon stations.

She was strangled and her body hanged from a tree late on Saturday night. Police recovered the body on Sunday and sent it to the Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College and Hospital in Bhagalpur for postmortem.

The victim, who hails from New Jalpaiguri in West Bengal, took the train from Alipore to Delhi, along with her son. As the train was jampacked, she tried to get down at Sahibganj but was prevented from doing so by co-passengers, ASP, Bhagalpur, Meenu Kumari said. When the train slowed down between Vikramshila and Kahalgaon stations, she jumped out. It is not clear why she took this step.

A group of inebriated people then dragged her to a nearby mango orchard and sexually assaulted her. Liquor bottles were found at the spot, Kumari said.

A railway ticket and cellphone number of her village pradhan written on a piece of paper was recovered from the victim’s possession, police said.

Source

The number of reported rapes in India has increased from 2,487 in 1971 to 24,206 in 2011. 

How a victim-blaming system excuses rape
January 7, 2013

A horrifying 12-minute video of young men in Steubenville, Ohio, joking about the brutal, extended gang rape of a 16-year-old girl last August is now international news after it was posted on the Internet January 2 by the hacker group Anonymous—along with a stream of Twitter and Facebook posts, and photos of the unconscious victim being dragged by her wrists and ankles.

The very clear picture that emerges is of a young woman drugged and then taken unconscious from one party to another while being repeatedly raped and violated by members of the school’s self-styled “rape crew”—while other members took pictures, tweeted about what was happening and made vicious jokes mocking the victim.

The Steubenville case is now about more than this horrific crime, however. The Anonymous postings, in particular, have shown the complicity of town and school officials in trying to bury the details and blunt the effects of this crime—and the readiness of some in the community to blame the victim of a gang rape, and in the most sickening terms.

In this respect, a rape in one Ohio town is revealing how U.S. society and its most revered institutions—law enforcement from the local to the federal level, and schools from the high school level to the most elite of college campuses—routinely minimize rape and sexual violence, and subject any woman willing to speak up about them to abuse and humiliation.

The rot goes far beyond Steubenville. The first national coverage of the case was an extended New York Times feature that ended up illustrating all the problems with the ways that rape and sexual assault are discussed in our society. The article read like a cross between a nonfiction retelling of the high school football TV drama Friday Night Lights and an anguished commentary on the uses and misuses of social media.

Readers could easily have been left with the sense that what happened in Steubenville was a tragedy for everyone involved, that the young men who committed the rape were also victims because they might lose promising futures, that it matters whether the town’s beloved football team had its reputation tarnished—and even that it’s difficult to determine what happened that August night because of conflicting stories and outlooks.

While the Times article extensively profiled the two young men charged with rape, the experiences and feelings of the victim are almost entirely missing. We only learned in the last few paragraphs that she is traumatized, unable to sleep, socially isolated and afraid to go to school.

In this context, the Anonymous leaks are welcome in having shone the spotlight on the misogynistic cruelty of the “rape crew” and the multiple ways in which the victim was dehumanized and brutalized. The facts about what happened are stomach-turning—and, as a record of the evening posted at the Local Leaks website shows, not at all difficult to piece together.

What’s clear is that school and town officials have been engaged in a systematic cover-up ever since August—which in turns shows the extent to which these young men could reliably expect to act with impunity.

The revelations about Steubenville are so horrifying that there is a danger the events will be seen as exceptional. Already, the young men involved are being described as sick sociopaths.

While it’s hard to watch the video footage and disagree, this misses the critical point that sexual assault is pervasive in our society—and that the ruling institutions of this society are responsible.

An extensive report by the Centers for Disease Control in 2010 found that one in five women reports having been the victim of rape or attempted rape in their lifetime. Any serious of discussion of rape and sexual assault today has to address why they take place so widely—and the multiple ways in which sexual assault survivors are re-victimized.

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IT IS depressingly easy to point to examples of the most reactionary politicians and public officials minimizing or even denying the reality of rape.

Todd Akin, the Republicans’ candidate for the U.S. Senate from Missouri, caused an outrage last year when he said that a woman could not become pregnant from “legitimate rape” – thus implying that some rapes that weren’t legitimate or real. In Indiana, another GOP Senate candidate, Richard Mourdock, described children resulting from rape as a “gift from God.” Then there’s Roger Rivard, a Wisconsin Republican who claimed last year that some women “just rape easy.”

But this all seems mild compared to the California judge who was finally admonished recently for his 2008 claim that “real” rape survivors are the ones whose vaginas are “shredded by rape.” In justifying his reduction of the sentence of a man convicted of raping his girlfriend, he said:

[I]f someone doesn’t want to have sexual intercourse, the body shuts down. The body will not permit that to happen unless a lot of damage is inflicted, and we heard nothing about that in this case. That tells me that the victim in this case, although she wasn’t necessarily willing, she didn’t put up a fight. And to treat this case like the rape cases that we all hear about is an insult to victims of rape. I think it’s an insult. I think it trivializes a rape.

It’s easy to write this off as the reactionary ranting of Republican Neanderthals. Yet there are real consequences—for example, the recent expiration of the federal Violence Against Women Act after the Republican House refused to vote on it.

More importantly, however, we have to recognize that there has been a much wider backsliding on the issue of rape and sexual violence.

Before the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the dominant idea of rape was that it was something that happened in dark alleys and bad neighborhoods, committed by strangers. The women’s movement punctured this mythology, revealing the truth—that most rapes happen between people who know each other and that sexual assault is much more common than people think. This represented a huge advance.

But the backlash against the gains of the women’s movement has had significant consequences. First, it has eroded steps towards actual equality between women and men and contributed to a culture steeped in sexism—one in which it is acceptable to think of women as objects for men’s pleasure. Second, it has changed the way in which rape and sexual assault are talked about.

Today, the myth of stranger rape has been replaced by the myth of what is referred to as “gray rape”—the idea that it is hard to identify what constitutes consent or non-consent, and that many situations described as rape are murky or confusing.

In the early 1990s, author Katie Roiphe wrote a book called The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism, which essentially claimed that date rape didn’t exist. Instead, according to Roiphe, date rape was a matter of women waking up and changing their minds. “There is a gray area in which one person’s rape may be another’s bad night,” she wrote. Her argument was that women weren’t willing to take responsibility for their own sexual activity and instead reverted to accusations of rape.

Roiphe’s argument was shocking at the time, but now some of the reactionary assumptions she peddled have seeped into the mainstream discussion.

The women’s magazine Cosmopolitan, usually filled with articles about how women can best satisfy men, was the first to push the concept of “gray rape.” In a cover article, journalist Laura Sessions Stepp laid out the basic argument: “Many experts feel that gray rape is in fact often a consequence of today’s hookup culture: lots of partying and flirting, plenty of alcohol and, ironically, the idea that women can be just as bold and adventurous about sex as men are. How can something so potentially empowering become so damaging?”

In other words, the narrative goes like this: women have become more sexually active, alcohol use has increased, and there is an increasing “hookup culture”—therefore, confusion has developed over what constitutes consent. So sometimes men “cross the line,” but no one’s quite clear about whether it was rape or not.

There is a right-wing version of this narrative and a liberal one, cloaked in concern for women.

The right-wing argument essentially tells women that if you’re going to play with the big boys, then you’re going to get hurt. Stepp’s Cosmopolitan article quotes a woman saying, “If you make the choice to leave the bar with the guy, then you are also creating the opportunity for something to go wrong. I think that is the point that needs to be driven home to everyone who participates in the hookup culture. Yes, you can practice safe sex. Yes, you can have casual sex without strings. But this behavior carries a risk.”

Full article

An important read.

How Anonymous hacking exposed Steubenville HS rape case
January 5, 2013

At an August football party in Steubenville, Ohio, a 16-year-old girl was allegedly raped by multiple athletes as she lay unconscious. Now, because of social media, horrific details of the case have been leaked to the masses, inspiring a call for increased accountability and a protest planned for this Saturday.

While two boys were arrested and charged in relation to the alleged rape, several others have been accused of playing a role in the crime, either by watching without intervening or disseminating photographs of the attack. Due to the small town’s close-knit nature, accusations of a coverup have emerged.  

According to various reports, an alleged “rape crew” dragged the young girl from party to party before she finally passed out. Testimony from witnesses suggests that she faced multiple sexual assaults while she was unconscious. One tweet suggests she may have been urinated on.

The victim did not realize she had been raped until she heard about the photographs, and then saw the images. One image shows two football players carrying the girl — who has not been identified because she is a minor — by her hands and ankles, as she hangs limp above the ground. The New York Timesreported that another image shows her lying naked on the floor.

Despite the disturbing nature of the case, for months only Alexandria Goddard of Prinniefied.com reported on the rape, documenting social media evidence with screenshots and suggesting a handful of perpetrators were to blame. Now that the hacktivist collective Anonymous has taken an interest in the case, new details are emerging. Photographs and other evidence on social media have raised questions about local authorities’ investigation. 

After demanding a public apology from the boys they identified by name as the so-called “rape crew” by January 1,  the rape-specific arm of Anonymous, KnightSec, released a disturbing video of a teenage boy who appears to be speaking moments after the rape occured. In it, he laughs at how the unconscious girl is “deader than Trayvon Martin,” was raped “quicker than Mike Tyson” and “more than [by] the Duke lacrosse team.” The same boy tweeted about the night, with disturbing posts like “Song of the night is definitely ‘Rape Me’ by Nirvana,” “you don’t sleep through a wang in the butthole,” and “some people deserve to be peed on.”

While Anonymous appears to have uncovered information that mainstream journalists could not, the police released a statement following the video’s release saying that law enforcement was aware of the footage and had interviewed the teen who made it. While police say witnesses have not heeded their calls to come forward, there appears to be an abundance of evidence suggesting other individuals were involved. But according to the New York Times, deleted images were unretrievable:

Eventually, 15 phones and 2 iPads were confiscated and analyzed by a cyber crime expert at the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. That expert could not retrieve deleted photographs and videos on most of the phones.

In the end, the expert recovered two naked photographs of the girl. One photograph showed the girl face down on the floor at one party, naked with her arms tucked beneath her, according to testimony given at a hearing in October. The other photograph was not described. Both photographs were found on Mays’s iPhone. No photograph or video showed anyone involved in a sexual act with the girl.

Anonymous complaints and chatter on the Internet about a less than fully aggressive investigation have perhaps not surprisingly proliferated.

Adding to the Anonymous-led conspiracy theory is that Steubenville High head coach Reno Saccoccia did not bench or in any way suspend the players involved. 

Full article

This incident happened nearly five months ago, but this case is finally starting to cause some outrage on a national scale. Coincidentally, after the House GOP let the Violence Against Women Act expire on January 2, Sen. Patty Murray is expected to reintroduce VAWA this year. 

But smashing rape culture must go beyond an act of legislation. As writer Jessica Valenti for The Nation wrote:

“We live in a country where politicians call rape a “gift from God” and suggest that women regularly lie about being raped. Where a group of young men in high school think so little of sexual assault that they thought it was fine—hilarious, even—to post pictures online of a passed out rape victim, and to live-tweet the rape, joking about the victim being urinated on. We live in a country where media as revered as The New York Times finds it necessary to describe an 11-year-old gang rape victim as “wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s.” Where a woman can be fired because her boss finds her “irresistable” and a woman’s rape case falls flat because she isn’t married.

It’s time to acknowledge that the rape epidemic in the United States is not just about the crimes themselves, but our own cultural and political willful ignorance.

Rape is as American as apple pie—until we own that, nothing will change.”

Indian woman jumps from train to escape rape
January 4, 2013

A young woman is in hospital in critical condition after throwing herself off a moving train in an attempt to escape molestation. It’s the latest in a number of incidents that have exposed the vulnerability of women in India.

The 25-year-old woman jumped from the carriage of a moving train after allegedly being molested by a soldier. The attack occurred on Thursday while the train was en route from Darjeeling to Delhi. The man groped her after she had visited the lavatory. After pushing him back, the woman jumped from the Brahmaputra Mail line train. The mother of two is being treated in hospital in the city of Patna. 

“Her condition continues to be critical. A team of doctors is treating her. She has suffered injuries to her head and legs,” a police official told the IANS news agency.

A member of the Assam Rifles paramilitary force has been arrested and charged in connection with the incident. 

It comes just weeks after a 23-year-old medical student was gang-raped on a bus in Dehli, while her male companion was severely beaten. She later died from her injuries in hospital.

The male companion has revealed more details of the tragic event. He recounted that in the immediate aftermath of the rape, no one responded to their cries for help. 

Police and passersby left the mortally injured female student lying naked and bleeding for almost an hour.

“We kept shouting at the police, ‘please give us some clothes’ but they were busy deciding which police station our case should be registered at,” the Zee News network reported on Friday.

Her case has resonated with the population as hundreds of thousands took to the streets to voice their anger over the attack and the lack of police response. The crowd demanded punishment for those responsible, as well as new laws to protect Indian women. 

The rapists have been arrested. Five of the men detained have been indicted with gang rape and murder, and are likely to face execution. They will face a specially-established fast-track court on Saturday. A sixth male is under 18 and will be judged in a juvenile court, despite the victim’s family’s plea for an adult trial, as he is believed to been the most brutal of the attackers. The victim’s father has also demanded new legislation on sex crimes to be named in honor of his daughter.

In an effort to provide more protection on transport routes and deter gangs operating on trains, India’s inspector general said the railway police have stepped up patrols. In 2012, police apprehended nearly 15 gangs and recovered 15 weapons from trains. 

The problem of sexual violence against women appears to touch all levels of Indian society, as on Thursday the ruling Congress party in Assam state suspended a politician accused of rape. Police claim that Congress leader Bikram Singh Brahma was visiting the village of Santipur when he entered a local house and raped a woman at 2am. The villagers later attacked the politician and captured the footage on tape.

New Delhi has an infamous reputation as India’s rape capital, seemingly confirmed by a report in the Hindustan Times that documents more than 20 rape cases in the city since December 16th, the day of the rape and brutal murder of the 23-year-old medical student.

Source