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On a Monday last month, after a conservative Maine legislator expressed outrage on Facebook about a transgender girl winning a high school pole vaulting event, the hammer of the federal government began to swing.

By Friday of that week, Feb. 21, President Donald Trump singled out Maine’s governor during a White House event and threatened to cut off the state’s federal funding. “See you in court,” Gov. Janet Mills shot back.

Then came a barrage of investigations and threats: The U.S. Department of Education opened inquiries into the Maine Department of Education and the student’s school district, alleging they had violated federal civil rights law. The same day, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services targeted the Maine Education Department, too, as well as the state’s university system.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture then launched an investigation into the university system; and on Tuesday, the university said the USDA had halted funding as the agency investigates “prospective” civil rights violations, records show.

The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter that “Maine should be on notice” that the agency was poised to sue. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration even pulled $4.5 million for marine research, but it didn’t touch the 33 other grantees who get similar funding.

Then last week, the Social Security Administration briefly became the sixth federal agency to target Maine, canceling contracts that allowed hospitals to automatically report births and funeral homes to report deaths.

Although the Social Security contracts were reinstated, and the state may reapply for the marine research funding, the moves had already wreaked havoc.

Now, more federal agencies are pressing down on Maine than there are transgender girls competing in girls’ sports in the state. Only two transgender girls are competing this school year, according to the Maine Principals’ Association.

“The president is trying to crush the opposition. He’s trying to crush Maine,” said David Webbert, a longtime civil rights attorney in Maine. To Webbert, it’s as if Trump is saying: “‘Maine believes in transgender rights? Well, you’re going to see what happens to you.’”

Some view Maine as a test case for how the Trump administration may try to force its policies on states, regardless of existing state laws. In public comments, residents have invoked the state’s motto to rally Mainers: “Dirigo,” Latin for “I lead.”

“It’s Maine now, but what state is it going to be next? This is not just a Maine issue, but Maine spoke up. So right now, it’s, ‘Let’s make an example out of Maine,’” said Kris Pitts, executive co-director of the nonprofit MaineTransNet.

State officials, thrust into the spotlight, have been trying to avoid becoming more of a target, carefully choosing their words and declining interviews with reporters. And Mills hasn’t challenged Trump again publicly on this issue.

There are signs the administration is preparing to force other states to follow the president’s directives: The DOJ recently sent letters to California and Minnesota threatening to sue those states if they don’t ban transgender girls from athletics.

The Trump administration also is taking a multiagency approach with Columbia University. On Friday, several federal agencies canceled a combined $400 million in grants and contracts because, the administration alleged, the university was not sufficiently combatting antisemitism.

The press release announcing the multimillion-dollar punishment contained a caution for noncompliant institutions: “Doing business with the Federal Government is a privilege.”

Nearly everything about the blitz of investigations in Maine, including how they’re being carried out, is not ordinary.

Federal agencies that don’t usually enforce civil rights laws in schools launched inquiries. HHS, for instance, usually focuses on health care access for people with disabilities or language translation, and there’s no evidence it’s conducted an investigation of Maine in the past 20 years.

Not only did it dive into Maine’s policies on transgender athletes, it reached a conclusion with unprecedented speed.

Investigations like this typically take months, if not years, according to a review of federal investigation data and records by ProPublica and the Bangor Daily News. But just one business day after announcing the investigation, the federal agency decided the Maine Department of Education wasn’t giving girls equal opportunities and had violated Title IX “by allowing male athletes to compete against female athletes,” according to a letter from HHS to the state.

It sent that finding to the general inbox at the Maine attorney general’s office after interviewing no one from that office, the Education Department, governor’s office or officials from two high schools cited in the letter for allowing transgender athletes to compete against girls, according to those agencies and schools.

The Maine attorney general’s office pointed out that the letter cited an incorrect sum of federal funding that flows to the state. Legal experts also viewed its interpretation of Title IX as problematic. Trump’s Feb. 5 “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order asserted that transgender girls can’t play girls’ sports under that federal law. But Title IX has never required schools to exclude them, and Trump’s order can’t rewrite federal law, said Deborah Brake, a professor at University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

“The president can put out an executive order saying anything he wants,” Brake said, but “there has never been a court decision interpreting Title IX to require the exclusion of transgender girls from girls’ sports.”

The president is trying to crush the opposition. He’s trying to crush Maine.

In a statement, the agency reiterated that Maine could lose federal funding if it didn’t comply with its position. “HHS will investigate and enforce Title IX to the full extent permitted by law to uphold fairness, safety, dignity, and biological truth in women’s and girls’ educational athletic opportunities. Men have no place in women’s sports,” it said.

The USDA investigation of the University of Maine, launched on a Saturday, the day after Mills’ exchange with Trump, also is unusual. In announcing the investigation, the department said $100 million to the university was at risk because of the state’s “blatant disregard” of Trump’s order; a university system spokesperson said that amount reflected multiple years of funding.

Then came a series of questions, according to records obtained by the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica. At 10:50 a.m. the following Tuesday, a USDA official sent a University of Maine official 10 yes-or-no questions about its transgender athlete policies — and gave her 1 hour, 10 minutes to respond. The officials agreed to discuss the questions over a Zoom call, and, about five hours after that call, the USDA sent a list of follow-up questions. The agency wanted those answers by 1 p.m. the following day.

Sherron Jernigan, a USDA civil rights director for the animal and plant inspection service, sent the questions:

“Does the University of Maine System provide sex-separated toilet, locker room, and shower facilities for male student athletes and female student athletes?” The university answered “yes.”

“Does the University of Maine System permit a biological male to participate in individual or team contact sports with biological females?” The university answered “no.”

The university’s Title IX coordinator told the USDA that none of the seven universities within the system has transgender athletes participating in NCAA-sanctioned sports. (Of the more than 500,000 students who compete on NCAA teams across the country, fewer than 10 are transgender, the league’s president recently told a U.S. Senate panel.)

In her response to follow-up questions, Liz Lavoie, the university’s Title IX coordinator, added that the USDA had not given the university “any explanation as to the basis or scope of its inquiry, or the steps in the process.”

“Further, we have been given mere hours to respond to both sets of questions and we are responding in good faith but find the approach concerning given the lack of official service and the informal nature that the questions and interview have been presented,” Lavoie wrote.

The USDA did not issue any findings after the questioning, but the agency already is taking action. On Tuesday, the university said the USDA had frozen funding that could affect research on everything from the contamination of Maine farms by forever chemicals to the sustainability of Maine’s lobster industry. Last fiscal year, the USDA awarded nearly $30 million to the University of Maine.

A USDA spokesperson said the agency would not comment on a pending investigation.

Webbert, the civil rights attorney, called the federal government’s inquiries “a show.”

“It’s a political move dressed up, very barely, with a legal process, but it’s a fake legal process. So it is very concerning because they’re not even trying to make it look like it’s due process,” he said. “It reeks of pure politics.”

Doing business with the Federal Government is a privilege.

The federal government has made no effort to hide the ideological perspective that its various inquiries are seeking to enforce in Maine and the rest of the county, according to documents obtained by ProPublica and the Bangor Daily News. In announcing its action in Maine, HHS said it wanted to “restore biological truth to the federal government” and in its findings cited an article from OutKick, a Fox-owned conservative news site with a mission of “exposing the destructive nature of ‘woke’ activism.”

Meanwhile, the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education — which does have a mandate to investigate gender-based discrimination in schools and, with more than 500 people, dwarfs most of the nation’s civil rights enforcement divisions — seemed to conclude that Maine was violating Title IX before it finished investigating.

The press release announcing the launch of the investigation quoted the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor: “It is shameful that Governor Mills refuses to stand with women and girls. Her rejection of the antidiscrimination obligations that Maine voluntarily accepted when it agreed to receive federal taxpayer dollars is unlawful.”

Trainor linked to “credible local reporting” around the pole vaulter in his letter to Maine officials announcing the civil rights investigation. The report came from the Maine Wire, an online outlet founded by a conservative think tank based in the state. The office hasn’t made contact with Maine since it notified state agencies of its investigation, according to the Maine agencies.

The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Maine’s governor never believed her state would receive an impartial investigation. “I imagine that the outcome of this politically directed investigation is all but predetermined,” Mills said in a statement after the Education Department investigation began. She has since declined to discuss her view of Maine’s transgender athlete policy.

But she has reiterated that Trump legally can’t force the state to violate its own law, the Maine Human Rights Act, which prevents discrimination based on gender identity.

Mainers aren’t sure what this full-court press will mean for their state; keeping up with it is hard enough. State Sen. Joe Rafferty, a Democrat who co-chairs the Legislature’s committee on education and cultural affairs, expressed disbelief when a reporter informed him that HHS’ investigation only lasted four days. He wasn’t aware it had officially started.

“That is why I think part of this is a mirage,” he said of the various investigations. The eventual resolution, he said, is more likely to be settled in a courtroom.

Indeed, HHS referred its finding to the DOJ, which can sue Maine to remove its federal funding. (The health agency also expanded its investigation last week to include the Maine Principals’ Association and the Maine high school where the pole vaulter is a student, according to the agency.) The results of that lawsuit could have significant implications, said Brake, the law professor. Not once since Congress enacted Title IX in 1972 has the DOJ ever cut off funding for a violation.

All the federal attention has been unsettling to some Mainers, welcomed by others who don’t want transgender girls playing girls’ sports and disruptive to the 625-student Greely High School, which the transgender pole vaulter attends.

“It’s just upsetting to everybody at school to be the center of attention and focus. It’s unnerving to go to school and the school is surrounded by police and reporters on every corner,” Gia Drew, who leads a statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy group called EqualityMaine, said of what she’s hearing from the community. “It’s hard to focus on a calculus test when your friends are under attack. It affects not just trans people but everyone who is part of a school system.”

After state Rep. Laurel Libby, a Republican from Auburn, singled out the student on her Facebook page and brought Trump’s attention to Maine, parents in the school district planned to show support by displaying signs and handing out treats before classes began, said state Rep. Christina Mitchell, a Democrat who represents Cumberland, home to Greely High School. She’s also a school board member in the district.

But there were television trucks and a police presence surrounding the school, so parents decided not to add to the commotion.

The Bangor Daily News and ProPublica reached out to the family of the student athlete but received no response. Mitchell said other students, including the transgender student’s teammates and competitors, are supportive of her. “Nobody was making a fuss,” she said.

And many in Maine don’t want a fuss. Even as Mills’ response to Trump made some proud — you can now buy “See you in court” T-shirts — others recognized that it launched Maine into the nation’s consciousness. “You watch it and feel like: ‘Oh, all eyes will be here. This will be something big,’” said Pitts, with MaineTransNet.

Libby and other Republican lawmakers have welcomed the chance to amplify their viewpoint that allowing transgender girls in sports is unsafe and discriminates against girls. Another Republican lawmaker introduced a bill to the Legislature to require transgender athletes to compete on teams matching the gender they were assigned at birth.

“All of the accomplishments of women over the years are being erased by men masquerading as women, erasing us from the history books,” Libby said in a weekly address from Maine House Republicans.

While Libby has been censured by Democrats who control the Maine House for her initial Facebook post about the pole vaulter, she has continued to make appearances on right-wing media to urge the governor to stop supporting the right of transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports. On Tuesday, she filed a lawsuit in Maine District Court against the state’s House speaker over the censure, accusing him of stripping her voting rights “in retaliation for protected speech on a highly important and hotly debated matter of public concern,” according to the complaint. Her party has rallied around her and her cause.

“Allowing biological boys to compete with our girls, is not only unpopular, and unfair, but it is also illegal,” Republican House Minority Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham of Winter Harbor said in a written statement. “Governor Mills should abandon this indefensible position and uphold Title IX protections for our girls.”

Maine institutions being targeted by the federal government have continued to follow state law. And at a regularly scheduled school board meeting at Greely High School on Thursday night, the board president pledged the district’s “unwavering support” of all students.

Mitchell said that Maine may be the federal government’s target now, but other states could be next.

“I think you have to stand up to it. Whatever you think is right, you have to stand up for it, because, if you don’t, it’ll just keep going and spread to other places,” Mitchell said. “We’re a small state, but if you give an inch, you know?”

Eli Hager contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

Women, girls, the elderly, and young boys have rushed to pack any vehicle they could as they escaped heavy tribal fighting that has erupted in Papua New Guinea’s Porgera Valley.

The sound of gunfire erupts in the peaceful valley, shouts of war follow the gunfire, and amid the chaos, women and girls have been hiding, ever keeping a close eye on the scenes unfolding before them.

The fight in the golden valley of Porgera started earlier this week when two factions of illegal miners fought among themselves and one faction of the group killed two men from the other faction.

• READ MORE: Pope Francis calls for end to tribal ‘spiral of violence’ in PNG visit

And the fight erupted from then on. With no leader since the death of their local member of Parliament, Maso Karipe, the valley has seen fighting intensify since Wednesday.

Caught smack in the middle are security personnel who have tried their best to bring peace to the mining township.

Papua New Guinea celebrates its independence from Australia on 16 September 1975 this weekend with a national holiday tomorrow.

The PNG Post-Courier attempted to make contact with security personnel but could only hear gunfire as the men continued to protect the mining site and each other.

Mass exodus of 5000
Porgera has seen a mass exodus of more than 5000 people.

The 20 people killed include two local mine workers and the numbers increase steadily each day. The electorate is run by gunmen, with all local services stopped and prices of goods the highest the electorate has seen in years.

The main road via Mulitaka has been closed since the May 24 landslide. The bypass road is yet to be completed.

A state of emergency must be declared, says Lagaip member Aikem Amos as his electorate borders the mining township.

He said that the government had often said short-term pain for long-term gain. However, that had fallen on deaf ears as gunmen moved into the valley laying waste to those who dared stand up against them.

Akem has called on the national government to intervene to stop the recent fight that has escalated.

He confirmed that all the schools, hospitals, aid posts, and other government services, including the BSP banking service in Porgera, were all closed in fear of this tribal warfare that is flaring like wildfire, costing a lot of lives.

Warlords ‘in control’
He said the fight was not confined to the Porgerans themselves but men from Lagaip districts and Mulitaka LLG were also involved in this fight.

“The fight is said to be covering all the Porgera valley,” Akem said.

The Lagaip MP said there was no road network, no communications, and even the price of goods and services had sky-rocketed in the last few days due to the fight and the road reconstruction in Mulitaka.

“The only thing that seems to be working is the Porgera gold mine,” Akem said.

He added there were not enough policemen and soldiers to maintain peace in the valley.

A few security personnel who were there were protecting the mine site and the nearby area and outside the mine premises all was in the hands of warlords.

“I as the member for Lagaip call for the government to intervene and declare a state of emergency in Porgera Valley now,” Akem said.

‘Peaceful golden valley’ gone
“If the government takes longer time to stop the fight in Porgera now, we might never have a mine in the next two weeks or months and years to come,” he added.

He said that there was no leadership in Porgera and the place once called a “peaceful golden valley” was in the hands of warlords now as we were were speaking.

Akem said without the late Maso Karipe there was nobody in Porgera to provide leadership.

“I am a leader for the people of Lagaip and I cannot look after Porgera District too given the status of my capability. But as a leader, I will always call for the national government’s intervention,” he said.

Prime Minister James Marape and coalition members were reminded in Parliament this week that law and order was the number one priority.

PM Marape said: “In this meeting, this body of leaders, on behalf of the coalition government, has elevated the fight for law and order as a number one priority as we move our country into 50 years of Independence and beyond.

“We resolved that, in the face of many competing needs, this government must, at the very earliest, explore every possible means to uphold the rule of law in our country, strengthen law enforcement, and ensure that the police and all systems of justice are functioning properly.

Concerted effort needed
“While we work on the economy, fixing health and education, and developing infrastructure through Connect PNG, every concerted effort must be made in the area of law and order, including fighting corruption.

“This is the number one focus for our coalition government.”

Prime Minister Marape emphasised that this initiative built upon the government’s ongoing efforts in the law and justice sector, including targeted personnel training to bolster ongoing force and the broader justice system.

According to sources on the ground the New Porgera mine had shut down its operations for a day as fighting continued on Wednesday.

However, by Thursday, the mine had reopened.

Miriam Zarriga is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Some of the girls were as young as 13, according to a village official in Khammouane province’s Hinboun district, who like many other sources in this report requested anonymity for security reasons.

“The restaurant has been shut down,” the police officer said. “For the girls and women, we just told them to go back home to their parents. We didn’t fine or punish them.”

The restaurant owners will be charged with human trafficking, he said.

Authorities went to the restaurant on June 7 because of its loud noise, the village official said. There are three other restaurants in the village that are also suspected of offering prostitution, he said.

Before they were sent home to their families, the girls and women underwent a re-education session in which they were told that providing sex service is against Lao tradition and law. 

“The purpose of today’s session is to make sure that the participants understand the guidelines and policy of the government and Party,” Soukkhaseum Sitthideth, president of the Lao Women’s Union of Khammouane province said in a video of the session seen by RFA.

“Lao women are traditionally conservative but nowadays in a digital era, our girls and women have changed,” she said. “Our tradition and culture have been affected by the changes. A great number of our girls and women have adopted a new lifestyle.”

Laos faces many challenges when it comes to fighting human trafficking, including not having the resources to properly fund enforcement against those who trick or force young people into illicit work.

Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath have left many Laotians in desperate financial situations amid a faltering economy and rampant unemployment.

In February, police near Vientiane raided nightclubs, restaurants and karaoke bars along a busy highway and found 47 sex workers, including four girls under 18 years old.

In that case, police also determined that most of the girls and women were from poor, rural families, an officer said at the time.

Translated by Max Avary. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Lao.

A verified X (formerly Twitter) user, Sunanda Roy (@SaffronSunanda) shared the ‘news’. Her tweet had received over 1,65,000 views and 3030 retweets before it was deleted.

The claim was forwarded multiple times on WhatsApp. Alt News received a request on its WhatsApp helpline to fact-check the claim.

Quote-tweeting @SaffronSunanda, an X user named Global Democracy Watch (@111gpt) amplified the claim and wrote, “Hindus, do not go to Quest Mall Area, Kolkata.”. (Archive)

Hindus, Do Not Go to Quest Mall Area, Kolkata.

6 jihadis #abducted daughter of a family waiting for cab.
-Guards didn’t do anything.
–@KolkataPolice closed its eyes
2 hours later jihadis dropped back the girl.

Families/women are getting harassed.
4 such brutalities in 10 days https://t.co/vsiV1dpjWQ

— Global Democracy Watch (@111gpt) March 18, 2024

Fact Check

Four incidents of kidnapping within a span of 10 days, as claimed in the viral text, amounts to an alarming deterioration of the public safety. So, first, we checked local newspapers for a report on the alleged incidents, but could not find any mention of anything similar.

We noticed that the official X handle of DCP (South East) of Kolkata Police had on X shared a statement calling the message ‘fake’.

Sharing a screenshot of the viral claim, the DCP tweeted, “A fake message regarding Quest Mall is being circulated on social media by some mischievous elements. Kolkata Police assures that no such incident has taken place.” He further added, “A criminal case has been initiated at Karaya PS over the issue. Legal action will be taken against those responsible for spreading such rumors and fake messages.”

A criminal case has been initiated at Karaya PS over the issue. Legal action will be taken against those responsible for spreading such rumours and fake messages. (2/2)#StayAlertStaySafe#WeCareWeDare#SouthEastDivision_MyPride@CPKolkata@KolkataPolice@WBPolice

— DCP SED Kolkata Police (@KPSoutheastDiv) March 24, 2024

We reached out to Quest Mall vice-president, Sanjeev Mehra who stated that the viral claim ws false and that Kolkata Police was taking necessary steps. He stated, “There seems to be a continuous pattern to harm the image of Quest Mall because false claims regarding the mall were also spread in the past.”

The Quest Mall authorities lodged a formal police complaint which was turned into an FIR under Sections 504, 505(2), 509 and 120(b) at the Kolkata’s Karaya police station. The FIR states, “Sometime before 16/03/24 unknown miscreants entered into criminal conspiracy and in pursuant to that circulated fake, fabricated, misleading and unverified rumour including insulting the modesty of women in general with an intention to provoke serious breach of peace, law and order, communal harmony as well as to promote hatred amongst people of different locality and religion, causing feeling of enmity and hatred amongst different religious communities and different localities.”

We accessed another complaint letter submitted to police by the mall authorities.

Alt News also spoke to people near the Quest Mall. A local resident, Sabir, refuted the viral claim. He stated that no such incident of abduction or kidnapping happened near Quest Mall. Jumman, a local taxi driver, said he had never heard such allegations. Ahmad, a local shop owner, also refuted the viral claim stating, ”This is a false claim. There has been no such incident near Quest Mall area. The Karaya police station is only a few minutes away (from the mall) and the officials regularly go on rounds in the locality. So, if such an incident happened, the locals and the police would have been surely informed.”

Speaking to Alt News, Joint CP (Crime) of Kolkata police Syed Waquar Raza said, “No such incident (as the one reported in the viral WhatsApp message) has come to our knowledge. As far as the false claims on social media are concerned, we are investigating the case. Action will be taken against those found involved.”

To sum up, the entire claim about an incident of kidnapping of a girl from Kolkata’s Quest Mall area is unfounded and false. The viral message on WhatsApp and the social media claims are fake.

In May 2023, an incident of around 25 people residing around the Quest Mall entering the shopping centre for a brief period after their area was without electricity for several hours was given a communal spin and social media posts around the incident took on a hateful, Islamophobic tone.

Abira Das is an intern at Alt News.

The post Rumour about Muslim men kidnapping girls from Kolkata’s Quest Mall viral; no truth in it, say police appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abira Das.

But women who are unmarried or do not have a "mahram," or male guardian, face even tougher restrictions and have been cut off from access to health care, banned from traveling long distances, and pressured to quit their jobs.

The Taliban's mahram rules prohibit women from leaving their home without a male chaperone, often a husband or a close relative such as a father, brother, or uncle.

Single and unaccompanied women, including an estimated 2 million widows, say they are essentially prisoners in their homes and unable to carry out the even the most basic of tasks.

Among them is Nadia, a divorced woman from the northern province of Kunduz. The mother of four has no surviving male relatives.

"These restrictions are stifling for women who now cannot do the simple things independently," Nadia told RFE/RL's Radio Azadi.

The 35-year-old said women also need to have a male escort to visit a doctor, go to government offices, or even rent a house.

She said she had to pay a man to be her chaperone in order to meet a realtor and sign a rental agreement.

Nadia also paid a man in her neighborhood around 1,000 afghanis, or $15, to accompany her to the local passport office. But the Taliban refused her passport application and ordered her to return with her father, who died years ago.

"Even visiting the doctor is becoming impossible," she said. "We can only plead [with the Taliban] or pray. All doors are closed to us."

Mahram Crackdown

Women who violate the Taliban's mahram requirements have been detained or arrested and are often released only after signing a pledge that they will not break the rules again in the future.

In its latest report, the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said the Taliban's notorious religious police was enforcing the rules by carrying out inspections in public spaces, offices, and education facilities as well as setting up checkpoints in cities.

Released on January 22, the report said three female health-care workers were detained in October because they were traveling to work without a mahram.

In December, women without male chaperones were stopped from accessing health-care facilities in the southeastern province of Paktia, the report said.

And in the southern province of Kandahar, the Taliban visited a bus terminal and checked if women were traveling with a male relative, the report said.

In late 2021, the Taliban said women seeking to travel more than 72 kilometers should not be offered transport unless they were accompanied by a close male relative.

In another incident, the Taliban advised a woman to get married if she wanted to keep her job at a health-care facility, saying it was inappropriate for a single woman to work, the report said.

In a report issued on January 18, the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) said the Taliban's restrictions on single and unaccompanied women has ensured that female-led households receive less income and food.

"Their share of employment has nearly halved, decreasing from 11 percent in 2022 to 6 percent" in 2023, the report said.

The report noted that female-headed households typically care for more children and get paid less for their work and consume lower quantities of food.

"Female-headed households have greater needs for humanitarian assistance and yet report more restrictions to accessing such assistance," the report said.

"Unaccompanied access by women to public places such as health facilities, water points, and markets has declined in the past two years," the report added.

'Deeply Insulting'

Parisa, an unmarried woman, takes care of her elderly parents in the northeastern province of Takhar.

With her father bedridden and her two brothers working in neighboring Iran, she has been forced to take care of the family's needs.

But she said she has been repeatedly harassed by the Taliban while trying to buy groceries in the local market, located some 10 kilometers away from her house.

"What can women do when men in their families are forced to leave the country for work?" she told Radio Azadi, giving only her first name for security reasons.

"I have no choice but to look after my family's basic needs. The Taliban's attitude is deeply insulting and extremely aggressive."

Parisa said she has pleaded with local Taliban leaders to relax the mahram requirements. But she said her efforts have been in vain.

"They start abusing and threatening us whenever we try to tell them that we have to leave our houses to meet our basic needs," she said.

Parasto, a resident of Kabul, said the Taliban's restrictions are preventing single women from seeking the limited health care that is available.

"The doctors in the hospitals and clinics are reluctant to see unaccompanied women," she told Radio Azadi.

Parasto said the Taliban's mounting restrictions on women, especially those who are unmarried or do not have a male guardian, have made life unbearable.

"Single women are trying to survive without rights and opportunities," she said.

Written by Abubakar Siddique in Prague based on reporting by Naqiba Barakzai, Abida Spozhmai, and Khujasta Kabiri of RFE/RL's Radio Azadi

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

The rise in social media platforms uploading naked pictures of women and girls has come to the attention of the Censorship Board in Papua New Guinea with Chief Censor Jim Abani warning about the dangers.

In what many have termed as cyber bullying, a picture of women or girls uploaded on social media is then downloaded by other people who use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in creating new content like images and videos of the women or girls involved in sexual activities, including being naked and also involved in pornography.

Chief Censor Abani said his office had received many complaints regarding GAI in creating new content like images and videos of recent reported cases, including uploading of nude images of females on social media.

• READ MORE: AI-generated nude images spread at Spain school, parents outraged
• Other PNG crime reports

He said it was disrespectful and a “disgrace to our mothers and sisters”.

More than 20 girls in Spain reported receiving AI-generated naked images of themselves in a controversy that has been widely reported globally.

Chief Censor Abani said the increase of using new and advanced technology features was alarming for a young and developing country such as PNG.

“We are talking about embracing communication and connective and empowering economy but also the high risks and dangers of wellbeing is my concern, Chief Censor Abani said.

“I call on those sick minded or evil minded people to stop and do something useful and contribute meaningful to nation building.

New Facebook trend
“This is a new trend with Facebook users in the country on social media platforms increasing with unimaginable ways of discriminating and harassment using fake names to post images — particularly of young females — that are not suitable for public consumption or viewing,” he said.

He said he was calling on all relevant agencies to come together, including the Censorship Office, to start implementing some policies and regulations to address these
issues.

Chief Censor Abani said people were unaware of dangers — “particularly our female users of social media platforms”.

These acts were without the individuals’ consent and knowledge using Generative AI applications.

“Technology is good but we must use wisely and being responsible in using such information that is provided,” he said.

He said the Censorship Office would work closely with Department ICT, DATACO and NICTA, police cybercrime unit to use the Cybercrime Code Act to punish perpetrators while waiting for the Censorship Act to finalise a review and amendments.

Marjorie Finkeo is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Papua New Guinea’s police commissioner David Manning says a man allegedly involved in the kidnapping of 17 girls earlier this year has been arrested.

Commissioner Manning said the man was wanted in connection with a series of criminal activities within the Mt Bosavi area bordering Hela, Southern Highlands, and Western provinces.

“Among the alleged crimes committed by the individual are the armed robbery of K100,000 [NZ$46,000] in cash, the killing of a Chinese national, and multiple cases of rape at the Kamusi logging camp and surrounding villages in the Delta Fly region since 2019,” the commissioner said.

• READ MORE: ‘We chose death over being raped’ – PNG kidnap survivor speaks out
• Other PNG crime reports

“Recently, the arrested man was also allegedly involved in the kidnapping of 17 girls in the Mt Bosavi area.”

Manning said the police and PNG Defence Force officers, acting on intelligence reports from the community, tracked down the man at the Komon Market in Tari, Hela province.

“He was arrested, and a homemade pistol and 5.56 ammunition confiscated,” he said

The commissioner said the arrest would bring a sense of relief to the affected communities, as the investigation continues.

“At the same time, we are sending a strong message to the criminals and those who aid, abet and benefit from them, that they will be caught and dealt with, sooner or later by whatever force is deemed necessary.”

Breakthrough in election incident
Police have also arrested the main suspect in the shooting of a helicopter hired by police during the 2022 National General Election.

This man is the main suspect in the killings and the burning of Kompiam Station and has been charged with five counts of wilful murder and one count of arson.

Manning said the investigation into the various crimes carried out in Kompiam during the 2022 National General Election continues.

“New evidence has come to light of the involvement of senior provincial and national leaders in Kompiam during the election in 2022,” he said.

“Our investigation continues, but the information we have uncovered thus far is concerning.

“It is a sorry state of affairs when the government is working to end violence and we find that leaders are encouraging these crimes to be committed.”

The police chief said following the recent killings in Wapenamanda, two additional mobile squads had been deployed into the area to assist the Enga Provincial Police Command to restore law and order.

“A fight in the Kandep has already left 22 killed, and other fighting in Laiagam has resulted in the killing of six people and 20 in Wapenamanda.

“We are facing serious law and order situation in the province and engaging security personnel and applying strategies to stop those fights from escalating.

“This includes active involvement of provincial and national leaders from the province to engage and take responsibility.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

According to this article (sent to me by Allyn in New Zealand), “the number of Victoria Police employees self-identifying as ‘gender neutral’ has more than quadrupled since last year as the force confirms it is investigating reports some of its officers are gaming the HR system in order to gain an extra $1300 a year.”

ACANB? (all cops are non-binary)

“In its annual report last year, Victoria Police only had 32 employees who were so-called ‘self-described’ as neither male nor female. But workforce figures as of June 27 provided to news.com.au show that number had soared to 139 — 127 of whom are sworn officers.”

“Self-described.”

Let’s end the “gender ideology” psyop now — before they try pushing “gender-neutral” shopping discounts, tax breaks, advantages when applying for a job or school, and more.

Related: Two 14-year-old girls have written an open letter to the UK Education Secretary Gillian Keegan ahead of the forthcoming Department for Education report on transgender schools guidance.

Read their letter right here.

The kids are asking for help. It’s our job to deliver for them.

If anyone tells you there’s nothing dangerous about chants like “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children,” show them this right here. Click the link if you think anyone is overreacting.

Again, the kids desperately need and are begging for help.

It’s our job to protect them.

Speak it into existence and speak up — loud and often.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

According to this article (sent to me by Allyn in New Zealand), “the number of Victoria Police employees self-identifying as ‘gender neutral’ has more than quadrupled since last year as the force confirms it is investigating reports some of its officers are gaming the HR system in order to gain an extra $1300 a year.”

ACANB? (all cops are non-binary)

“In its annual report last year, Victoria Police only had 32 employees who were so-called ‘self-described’ as neither male nor female. But workforce figures as of June 27 provided to news.com.au show that number had soared to 139 — 127 of whom are sworn officers.”

“Self-described.”

Let’s end the “gender ideology” psyop now — before they try pushing “gender-neutral” shopping discounts, tax breaks, advantages when applying for a job or school, and more.

Related: Two 14-year-old girls have written an open letter to the UK Education Secretary Gillian Keegan ahead of the forthcoming Department for Education report on transgender schools guidance.

Read their letter right here.

The kids are asking for help. It’s our job to deliver for them.

If anyone tells you there’s nothing dangerous about chants like “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children,” show them this right here. Click the link if you think anyone is overreacting.

Again, the kids desperately need and are begging for help.

It’s our job to protect them.

Speak it into existence and speak up — loud and often.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

A woman who was part of a group kidnapped in Papua New Guinea in February has spoken out after the kidnapping and reported rape of 17 schoolgirls in the same area of Southern Highlands earlier this month.

Cathy Alex, the New Zealand-born Australian academic Bryce Barker and two female researchers, were taken in the Mt Bosavi region and held for ransom.

They were all released when the Papua New Guinea government paid a ransom of US$28,000 to the kidnappers to secure their release.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Cathy Alex’s kidnapping story
• Other PNG kidnapping reports

Alex, who heads the Advancing Women’s Leaders’ Network, said that what the 17 abducted girls had gone through prompted her to speak out, after the country, she believed, had done nothing.

A local said family members of the girls negotiated with the captors and were eventually able to secure their release.

The villagers reportedly paid an undisclosed amount of cash and a few pigs as the ransom.

Alex said she and the other women in her group had feared they would be raped when they were kidnapped.

‘My life preserved’
“My life was preserved even though there was a time where the three of us were pushed to go into the jungle so they could do this to us.

“We chose death over being raped. Maybe the men will not understand, but for a woman or a girl rape is far worse than death.”

Alex said they had had received a commitment that they would not be touched, so the revelations about what happened to the teenage girls was horrifying.

She said her experience gave her some insight into the age and temperament of the kidnappers.

“Young boys, 16 and up, a few others. No Tok Pisin, no English. It’s a generation that’s been out there that has had no opportunities. What is happening in Bosavi is a glimpse, a dark glimpse of where our country is heading to.”

The teenage girls from the most recent kidnapping are now safe and being cared for but they cannot return to their village because it is too dangerous.

Need for focus
Cathy Alex said there was a need for a focus on providing services to the rural areas as soon as possible.

She said people were resilient and could change, as long as the right leadership was provided.

Bosavi is one of the remotest areas in PNG, with no roads and few services

It suffered significant damage during earthquake in 2018.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A woman who was part of a group kidnapped in Papua New Guinea in February has spoken out after the kidnapping and reported rape of 17 schoolgirls in the same area of Southern Highlands earlier this month.

Cathy Alex, the New Zealand-born Australian academic Bryce Barker and two female researchers, were taken in the Mt Bosavi region and held for ransom.

They were all released when the Papua New Guinea government paid a ransom of US$28,000 to the kidnappers to secure their release.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Cathy Alex’s kidnapping story
• Other PNG kidnapping reports

Alex, who heads the Advancing Women’s Leaders’ Network, said that what the 17 abducted girls had gone through prompted her to speak out, after the country, she believed, had done nothing.

A local said family members of the girls negotiated with the captors and were eventually able to secure their release.

The villagers reportedly paid an undisclosed amount of cash and a few pigs as the ransom.

Alex said she and the other women in her group had feared they would be raped when they were kidnapped.

‘My life preserved’
“My life was preserved even though there was a time where the three of us were pushed to go into the jungle so they could do this to us.

“We chose death over being raped. Maybe the men will not understand, but for a woman or a girl rape is far worse than death.”

Alex said they had had received a commitment that they would not be touched, so the revelations about what happened to the teenage girls was horrifying.

She said her experience gave her some insight into the age and temperament of the kidnappers.

“Young boys, 16 and up, a few others. No Tok Pisin, no English. It’s a generation that’s been out there that has had no opportunities. What is happening in Bosavi is a glimpse, a dark glimpse of where our country is heading to.”

The teenage girls from the most recent kidnapping are now safe and being cared for but they cannot return to their village because it is too dangerous.

Need for focus
Cathy Alex said there was a need for a focus on providing services to the rural areas as soon as possible.

She said people were resilient and could change, as long as the right leadership was provided.

Bosavi is one of the remotest areas in PNG, with no roads and few services

It suffered significant damage during earthquake in 2018.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

And in an exclusive interview with UN News’s Nancy Sarkis, Afghan civil rights activist Shaharzad Akba explains that women and girls there talk of “being buried alive, breathing, but not being able to do much else”.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Nancy Sarkis.

“Life is brief and to have to spend every day of it doing what somebody else wants you to do is not the way to live it.”
– Cormac McCarthy

+ If Trump had given his trove of documents to say Wikileaks (or even Tucker Carlson), he might have a credible claim as a whistleblower. Instead he kept them for his own vanity, flashed them to visitors and had his Justice Department file charges against Julian Assange for violating … the Espionage Act.

+ When I think about the many victims of the Espionage Act, my thoughts immediately go to Ethel Rosenberg, convicted not, as many believe, for treason, but of being engaged in a conspiracy to “commit espionage.” The case against Ethel was thin and manufactured. Even J. Edgar Hoover opposed her execution, which was in the hands of Federal Judge Irving Kaufman, a close friend of her tormentor and prosecutor Roy Cohn.  In condemning the couple to death, Kaufman bizarrely  blamed them for starting the Korean War, a judgment so irrational it alone should have been grounds for reversal:

[the Rosenbergs] already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.

It was later revealed that over the course of the trial and again before imposing the death penalty, Kaufman had engaged in secret and grossly unethical communications with Cohn, conversations which sealed Ethel’s fate. Her electrocution was nothing short of judicial murder. (See: Judgment and Mercy: the Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs by Martin J. Siegel)

I guess there’s some cold karma in fact that Trump is ensnared by the very same merciless law that his mentor Cohn invoked in his “public burning” of the Rosenbergs 70 years ago. The evidence against Trump is far more voluminous than it was against Julius and Ethel, much of it captured in his own words and in his own gilded bathroom. The Rosenbergs, after all, were convicted of giving away secrets, which weren’t really secrets (and no longer secret in any event) but merely physics. Yet in this case, and here’s where the karmic resonances begin to move in reverse, the Judge who will preside over Trump’s fate is his own appointee, a minimally qualified jurist, who landed on the bench because she was a fawning acolyte of the great swindler, a woman whose one qualification for her lifetime federal gig is that she probably doesn’t even need ex parté communiques to know which decisions she’s expected to make.

+ The Espionage Act has never been primarily about the keeping of secrets, but in using secrecy to punish dissent against government malfeasance. Yet in Trump, the Espionage Act may have met its match. If documents can be viewed by someone as stupid, venal and careless as him, even as president, they should be freely available to all Americans.

+ One of the most consequential criminal trials in US history will be overseen by one of the least qualified judges to ever assume a seat on the federal bench, Aileen Cannon. But how did she get there? You guessed it, Democrats. 12 Democratic Senators voted to confirm Cannon’s nomination after the 2020 election as a favor to the GOP majority, which didn’t have enough Senators present that day. The 12 Democratic senators were: Biden’s two Delaware pals Carper and Coons, the two Nevada senators Cortez-Masto and Jacky Rosen, Dianne Feinstein (though who can tell if she even knew what she was voting on), the two Virginia senators Warner and HRC’s running mate Tim Kaine, Maggie Hassan, the now departed Doug Jones, the two Partrick’s Murphy and Leahy(!), and Joe Manchin, naturally.

+ Forbes ran a piece saying that during the time Trump was warehousing classified documents in Mar-a-Lago’s bathrooms, showers and stages, his resort was looking to hire more than 400 foreign workers. The story here isn’t the “secret documents” but Trump wanting to hire 400 foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago. Are they forced to work to free their separated family members from detention in ICE concentration camps?

+ What country have these people been living in? It’s not like most of them stood in Niemöller-like silence for 40 years as the feds came for crack users, welfare mothers, immigrant families, striking workers, jaywalkers, whistleblowers, and medical pot users–they cheered them on!

+ There are 2 million people currently incarcerated in US prisons and jails. There are 5 million formerly incarcerated people in the US. 20 million people have been convicted of felonies. 80 million have some kind of criminal record. They’ve already come for and gotten almost all the rest of us.

+ Still, I’m afraid this may help prove Trump’s claim that he’s been the victim of selective prosecution…

+ Tyler, Jackson, Johnson, Grant, Harding, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama (droning of American citizens) all should have been indicted for felonies by any country which purports to operate by “the rule of law.”

+ Wouldn’t this be a welcome development? The people who break the laws they make or swear to uphold or enforce should be the first ones prosecuted not the last. Why should they skate just because they’re politicians?

+ When General David Petraeus pled guilty to giving classified materials to his paramour and biographer, Paula Broadwell, the crime of “mishandling” classified information was a misdemeanor, where the maximum penalty was a year in prison. After Trump took office, largely in response to his haranguing of HRC, the crime was upgraded to a felony and his Justice Department vigorously enforced it.

+ For example, Trump’s DOJ sent Nghia Pho, who worked for the National Security Agency’s hacking unit, to prison for more than five years under the Espionage Act for taking classified documents home to get extra work done on nights and weekends.

+ The Wall Street Journal editorial page, January 5, 2001: “Yes, Mr. Clinton should be indicted, upholding the principle that even Presidents and ex-Presidents are not above the law.”

+ Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley said that he hadn’t read the indictment of Trump because he’s “not a legal analyst.” Shouldn’t he have told us this before he served as Chairman of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee?

+ We’ve entered (or perhaps never left) the Anal Stage of American politics…

“There are 33 bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago,” asserted Florida Rep. Bryon Donalds. “So don’t act like it’s just in some random bathroom that the guests can go into.”

Reporter: “Was that a good look for [Trump] to have boxes in a bathroom?”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy: “Is it a good picture to have boxes in a garage that opens up? A bathroom door locks.”

+ Of course, bathroom doors lock from the inside so you can take a crap in peace and won’t be disturbed as you thumb through the boxes looking for the CIA’s assessment of the results from Little Rocket Man’s last colonoscopy.

+ If the US is, in fact, becoming a “Banana Republic” as many Republicans now insist, it seems only appropriate, since we invented and have supported (often with death squads) that form of government for the last 125 years…

+ The worm has turned…

+ Former White House chief of staff John Kelly on Trump’s post-arraignment rally: “He’s scared shitless. This is the way he compensates for that. He gives people the appearance he doesn’t care by doing this. For the first time in his life, it looks like he’s being held accountable. Up until this point in his life, it’s like, I’m not going to pay you, take me to court. He’s never been held accountable before.”

+++

DeSantis: As president, I recognize that the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth so we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress. pic.twitter.com/8bd7eQSDgM

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 3, 2023

+ Who knew the war on corporations would finally be launched because they sold t-shirts and beer to gay and trans people and not because they gouged prices, poisoned your drinking water, evicted you from your home, killed the Gulf of Mexico, made life-saving drugs too expensive to buy and turned the atmosphere into an air fryer?

+ DeSantis is the big money candidate for the Republican nomination. In May, he raised $8.2 million on day one, but from only 40,000 donors for an average of more than $200 a pop. For comparison, Bernie Sanders raised $5.9 million on day one of his 2019 campaign from 220,000 donors for an average of $26 averaged per donation.

+ Here’s Nikki Haley, described as the most reasonable of the Republican candidates for president, trashing trans kids on CNN: “How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker room. And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year.” This is a disgusting lie. Has one girl ever “seriously contemplated suicide” because a trans kid was in the locker room? Is there even one case? But we know the reverse is true. Trans kids are some of the most vulnerable to suicide ideation, in large part because of the savage bigotry directed against them.

+ Nearly 70% of people, regardless of party, oppose legal restrictions on gender-affirming care for minor. But their opinion doesn’t seem to matter…

+ Trump in North Carolina this week: “It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that [trans]. I talk about cutting taxes, people go like that, I talk about transgender everybody goes crazy. Five years ago you didn’t know what the hell it was.”

+ Anyone who wears a cowboy hat inside of a television studio is obviously compensating for some perceived inadequacy about their own identity.

+ Scientific American: “A moral panic is sweeping though state legislatures in the U.S., an irrational feeling that harmless groups pose a threat to society and need to be stopped.”

+But it’s not just the US… In British Columbia this week,  grandparents attending a school track meet in Kelowna stopped the event and demanded that a 9-year-old female student be examined to make sure they weren’t a boy competing in a girls event.

+ RIP Pat Robertson: “The feminist agenda is … about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism & become lesbians.” You go, girls!

+ Give Rev. Pat Robertson credit. He had an unshakeable belief in anthropogenic climate change. Every extreme weather event he attributed to human causality and that cause was: iniquity. Probably due to some atmospheric signal interference, Pat simply misinterpreted the message from the Supreme Deity, who’s condemnation of “drilling” Pat understood as meaning “sodomy.”

+ The Southern Baptists, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, whose leadership has been implicated in a decades-long coverup of sexual abuse in the church, is set to officially ban women pastors this week, arguing that they’re a gateway to the “acceptance of homosexuality and sexual immorality.”

+++

+ For some reason, I’d always thought of Enrico Fermi as one of the more humane of the mad scientists working on the military application of splitting atoms. Then I read Fermi proposed that instead of building a bomb, the Manhattan project physicists should concentrate on amassing as much radioactive material as possible and using it to poison the food supply of Nazi Germany. This, like so many other mad schemes, appealed to Edward Teller who promptly worked out a plan to separate piles of Strontium-90. In the end, Oppenheimer rejected the scheme–not because it might end up irradiating half of Europe for the next 1000 years but because wouldn’t kill enough German soldiers. Oppenheimer wrote to Fermi: “I think we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food enough to kill a half a million men.” May, 1943.

+ When we think about the criminal legacy of Harvard, high on the list should be the fact that the first person to recommend targeting civilians with atomic weapons was Harvard’s president James B. Conant, who during a May 1945 meeting of Truman’s Interim Committee, rejected pleas from scientists like Leo Szilard that representatives from the Japanese government, who were looking for ways to end the war, be invited to see a test shot of the A bomb. Instead Conant insisted that the bomb should be dropped without warning on an industrial target, which “employed a large number of workers and [was] closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” It was Conant’s argument that persuaded Defense Secretary Henry Stimson to put Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the target list.

+ Speaking of Harvard, the manager of Harvard Medical School’s morgue is accused of allowing buyers come into the morgue to select what remains they wanted to buy, then stealing parts of donated cadavers such as brains, skin and bones to sell on the black market.

+ John von Neumann, one of the most celebrated mathematicians of the 20th century, invented one of the first computers & left the technology in the public domain. He was a polymath and a dandy, who wore 3 piece suits everywhere he went, including on a mule ride in the Grand Canyon. Neumann loved music & played it loud, often German marches that caused Einstein to flee his office down the hall in Princeton. This cultured genius also wanted to annihilate the USSR by launching an all-out preemptive nuclear strike on Russia before they got the bomb. Perhaps fittingly, Von Neumann died of bone cancer from radiation exposure during his nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos. It’s surely just a coincidence that Von Neumann and Edward Teller, two of the most rabid anti-Soviet nuclear hawks, were Hungarian. After all, consider Curtis Lemay: the monster they called “The Big Cigar” was homegrown on Ohio corn, cherry bombs and the marches of John Phillip Susa.

+ Harry Truman’s defenders celebrate him for his “common sense” approach to the presidency. Yet this often played out as a kind of arrogant stupidity. When Truman met with Oppenheimer weeks after the nuclear bombings of Japan, the scientist pleaded with him to work with the Soviets on nuclear deterrence. (This after Truman had  stubbornly refused to tell his ally Stalin about the bomb at Potsdam.) Truman scoffed at the man who supervised the creation of the world’s first nuclear weapons and asked him to guess when the Soviets would get the bomb. Oppenheimer said he didn’t know but likely soon. Truman laughed and said: “I know when. Never!”

+ Triad National Security, the contractor that runs Los Alamos Nuclear Labs, was just cited for four major safety violations in 2021.  The IG also criticized the company for placing “too much of the blame on workers rather than looking at systemic problems and defective equipment.”

+ Jonathan Swift, the judge who just denied Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the US, said in a 2018 interview that his “Favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies. ‘They take preparation and evidence-gathering seriously: a real commitment to getting things right.’”

+ It’s often said around here that the New York Times runs corrections in order to convince its readers that everything else in the paper is true. But even by that cynical standard this correction on a scurrilous piece it ran earlier in the week on Nicaragua is remarkable and gives you an idea how bad the rest of the story (and probably that entire day’s worth of stories) must’ve been: “An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the murders of dozens of priests and nuns in the civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala. They were killed by security forces and allied paramilitaries aligned with the government, not both sides.”

+ This week Barack Obama shared his top piece of career advice for Gen Z: “Just learn how to get stuff done.” Like droning American citizens and their kids without the trouble of a trial?

+ Mike Pence: “No State should use government authority to punish businesses that hold different political views, in California or anywhere else.” When Mike Pence was governor of Indiana, he signed into a law that divests state funds from companies that boycott Israel.

+ The scourging of Roger Waters is a textbook example of the strategy of Israeli-funded operations in the US and UK to stifle any criticism of its policies and smear its critics–especially in the arts and academia–as described by James Bamford in his important new book, Spyfail.

+ I don’t think even Norman Finkelstein could have predicted that in response to Roger Waters’ performance of The Wall featuring her name as a victim of state violence, the Anne Frank foundation would attempt to trademark the name “Anne Frank”– although it was the logical outcome of the dynamic described in his book The Holocaust Industry...

+ Will they come after Bob Dylan next? He’s been croaking out these lyrics at nearly every venue on his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour:

I’m just like Anne Frank,
Like Indiana Jones,
And them British bad boys,
the Rolling Stones.

+ At least Roger Waters didn’t consign Anne Frank into an embarrassing stanza of doggerel. In his dotage, Dylan seems to have proved Adorno’s line that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz (or Bergen-Belsen, for that matter.)

+++

+ In the 90 largest cities in the US, the murder rate is down by  12%. If this trend continues, it would represent one of the largest declines in the murder rate in the US in history. But where’s the press coverage?

+ Almost 70 percent of the homicides in the US each year (13,927 in 2019) are committed by people who know their victims and according to the FBI’s own statistics, people in the US are now almost as likely to be killed by police (1,039) as they are by a stranger (1,372).

+ Prior to 2007, gun sales in the US never topped more than 7 million guns in a single year. By the time Obama left office in 2017, the US was purchasing nearly 17 million guns a year. In 2020, US gun sales had soared to 23  million guns in a single year.

+ More than 4o percent of the people sentenced to life without parole were 25 or younger at the time of their conviction. Numerous studies show that their younger age contributes to diminished capacity to comprehend the risk and consequences of their actions.

+ A report by the Pew Charitable Trusts examined the cases of 33,128 children who were placed on probation in Texas from October 2013 to September 2017. Despite making up only 13% of Texas’ population, Black children accounted for 27% of youth on probation in Texas. In comparison, white children make up about 33% of the state’s population, but only 23% were placed on probation. Black children were also 1.5 times more likely to be placed in a facility and 1.2 times more likely to be placed on probation when compared to white children, who were most likely to receive alternatives like diversion or dismissal, according to the report. These disparities existed despite Black and white children being charged with a similar share of f felony offenses — 23.1% for Black children compared to 22.7% for white children. The report found that nearly half of the kids — 15,362 in total — remained on probation for more than one year, despite a low risk of recidivism.

+ A Chicago cop got out of 44 tickets by repeatedly that his girlfriend stole his car. 44 times!

+ Oakland police paid a broke homeless woman $30,000 to testify about a slaying she didn’t witness. Based on her testimony, two young men were sentenced to serve life in prison for a murder they didn’t commit. The real killer was never caught and the men’s three children grew up without a father.

+ At least two people appear to have died this year in Los Angeles’s jails from … hypothermia. There have been a total of 22 deaths in LA jails already this year.

+ In July 2016, Philando Castille was shot and killed by police in Minnesota after being pulled over for a broken taillight. In the wake of his killing, Ramsey County, Minnesota  changed its prosecution policies related to traffic stops based solely on minor infractions in 2021. Since then, the county has seen 66% decrease in traffic stops of Black motorists and an 86% decline in non-public safety traffic stops.

+ 37% of trans people who were receiving hormone therapy before incarceration were denied their hormones once inside.

+ An analysis by the New York Post disclosed that the NYPD issued 10,000 summonses to people for having open alcoholic beverages in public in the last year– 90% of people who received these tickets are Black or Hispanic.

+ Speaking of the “weaponization” of the Justice Department, after the Dobbs ruling came down the FBI increased the number of its investigations into abortion-rights activists by 1o-fold. Over to you, Jim Jordan. Jim? Hello? Are you there, Jim?

+ According to a new court filing on the atrocious conditions inside the jails of Los Angeles, prisoners are not getting toilet paper and instead have had to wipe themselves with orange juice cartons.

+ Sex offender registries don’t work and often punish those they seek to protect: “Those on registries are primarily men, and these laws are presented as policies that protect women and children. Yet those on registries live with partners, children, and parents who are also directly impacted by these restrictions.”

+++

+ More than two-thirds of the aluminum on the London Metals Exchange  is now of Russian origin.

+ In an attempt to rationalize their premature termination of Covid protocols, the Biden administration is resorting to victim blaming. Here’s HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra last week: “If you’re dying of Covid today, you didn’t take precautions.”

+ New research out of the University of Kansas shows that “the South had the highest percentages of people worried about finances. During the early pandemic, Northeastern residents reported the most anxiety, but the later period saw more anxiety in the South.”

+ Since 2012, the state of Mississippi has slashed  its public-health staff by more than 500 employees since 2012. Meanwhile, the state’s infant congenital syphilis is up by 900% and Mississippi now ranks first in the nation for gonorrhea and second for chlamydia.

+ The political economy of parking in America, according to Harry Grabar’s new book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World:

* More square footage is dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person.

* There are more 3 car garages in the US than one-bedroom apartments.

* Between 1950 and 1980, Los Angeles County aides 850 new parking spots every day.

* There are more than six parking spots for every car in the US.

* By 1940, at least 80% of all traffic signs in US cities involved parking.

* At least 72% of the land area in Detroit is devoted to the transport and storage of automobiles.

* Des Moines, Iowa has nearly the same number of parking spaces as Seattle, even though Seattle’s population is three times the size of Des Moines, where there are 20 parking spaces per household.

* At many airports in the US, parking generates more money than air traffic.

* Even at peak periods, most parking lots are only 60% occupied. Malls designed their parking lots to handle the maximum traffic experienced on only a few days a year during the peak Christmas shopping period.

* Los Angeles’ zoning laws require two parking spaces for each two-bedroom apartment, even though it doesn’t require two toilets.

+ The number crashes involving Teslas running on Autopilot continues to climb. At last count, there have been 736 crashes and 17 fatalities, 11 of the deaths since last May. According an analysis of the new government report.  Tesla’s self-driving capability is around 10 times more deadly than a regular car piloted by a human.

+ Here’s Elon Musk bragging about the advantages of using a Chinese labor force in Xinjiang to manufacture his Teslas: “They won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They will be burning the 3 a.m. oil. They won’t even leave the factory type of thing, whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”

+ These kinds of “grind it out” labor practices aren’t saving Twitter, who’s Second Quarter advertising revenues fell to $88 million (down 59%), which would amount to less than a billion dollars a year. Musk himself has said that Twitter needs to bring $3 billion a year just to break even.

+ Speaking of Musk, this week that apostle of unfettered speech mused that it might be time for the US to welcome a military dictator, like the Roman tyrant Sulla, Julius Caesar’s murderous role model, who after putting down a revolt in Athens, demolished both Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, (those purveyors of Cultural Marxism) and destroyed one of the greatest libraries of the Classical World…

+ Here’s historian Tom Holland’s description of Sulla’s destruction of the centers of Athenian learning…

[Sulla] ordered the groves where Plato and Aristotle had taught to be chopped down and used to build siege engines. When an Athenian peace delegation did what Athenian peace delegations had always done and began to discourse windily on the glories of its city’s past, Sulla silenced the talk with a gesture of his hand. “Rome did not send me here to be lectured on ancient history.” With this dismissal, he sent the delegates back to their city to eat boiled shoe leather and starve. Athens’s cultural capital had reached the limits of its overdraft. (Rubicon: the Last Days of the Roman Republic)

+++

+ “It’s not just the debt limit. What we’ve seen in the United States is a steady deterioration of governance,” James McCormack, managing director of Fitch Ratings.

+  At a recent Yale CEO Summit, 42% of the corporate bosses surveyed said AI has the potential to destroy humanity 5 to 10 years from now. Kindergarteners now being asked to fill out their bucket lists…

+ In 2011, the AFL-CIO’s operating budget for new organizing initiatives was $133.9 million dollars. Last year it was only $93.6 million.

+ An Arby’s employee who was found dead inside a freezer in May had “beat her hands bloody trying to escape.” A lawsuit against the company filed by the deceased woman’s children disclosed that “a latch on the freezer door had been broken since Aug. 22 and the store franchise owner and regional manager knew about it and didn’t fix it.” But at least Arby’s isn’t dispensing its sodas into Pride-themed plastic cups. So no reason to boycott them…

+ Despite $445 million in funding. Zume, Silicon Valley’s robot pizza-making startup, is shutting down. Trump’s former national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, served on Zume’s advisory board.

+ A survey of professional investors by Bloomberg shows that 90% think that “companies on both sides of the Atlantic have been raising prices in excess of their costs since the pandemic began in 2020.”

+ Good work, if you can get it: Harmeet Dhillon, an RNC committeewoman and Tucker Carlson legal advisor, pulls $120,000 salary from non-profit Center for American Liberty for a two-hour week.

+ In May, only 450 homes in the Denver metro area sold for less than $500,000–807 fewer than last year. The figure is now so low that the Denver Metro Association of Realtors has stopped analyzing that home price range entirely in its monthly market trend reports.

+ At the same time, foreclosure filings in the US are up by 14% from a year ago. A total of 35,196 U.S. properties carried foreclosure filings in May, a 7% increase from April of this year and a 14% rise from May 2022.

+ More and more American cities seem to be falling apart from the inside-out, incapable of providing even the basic level of services. Here Greater Stumptown, ambulances in Multnomah County (Portland) were unavailable to respond to more than 6,300 calls since January…

+ More than a quarter of the next-generation cancer drugs are being developed in China.

+ The Swiss capital of Bern announce this week that it will begin testing the controlled sale of cocaine. The CIA won’t like the competition.

+ It’s a different story on the high seas, where drug prohibition remains the rule. For example, Carnival Cruise liners have been using marijuana detection dogs on some routes. Jim Walker, a Miami-based maritime attorney, told the Sun Sentinel: “It’s obviously geared toward making certain that the only depressants used by cruise guests is booze sold by Carnival.”

+ Since the beginning of the year, the media industry has announced at least 17,436 job cuts, the most on record for this period of time. There have been more cuts in the last five months  than at the outset of the pandemic in 2020…and that’s not including CNN’s Chris Licht.

+ Charlie won’t use the condiments, unless he can be sure they contain his Daily Recommendation Allowance of micro-plastics,  forever chemicals and DDT…

Charlie Kirk: "I'm going through my refrigerator and I'm starting to ask the question: Was this ketchup bottle woke? Is this mustard? I mean, literally." pic.twitter.com/ncSHJR12v3

— Media Matters (@mmfa) June 13, 2023

+ Though the rise of the New Right seems in large measure to be fueled by a reaction against him, at his core Obama was certainly no paragon of “wokeness.” In 2006, he put these reactionary sentiments into print in The Audacity of Hope:

And if I’m honest with myself, I must admit that I’m not entirely immune to such nativist sentiments. When I see Mexican flags waved at pro immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.

+ So it’s clear the sermons of Jeremiah Wright didn’t have the slightest influence on him after all….

+++

+ Let’s check in on the Magical Mystery Tour known as the RFK, Jr campaign. This week the New York Times profiled Bobby’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, most well known for her role as Larry David’s ex on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Jr. intruded on Cheryl’s story by announcing that he “felt a lot of love and support from most of her friends, including Larry.” This provoked a response from David, who texted the Times: “Yes, love and support, but I’m not ‘supporting’ him.”

Next Bobby, whose father once marched with Cesar Chavez, took a night trip to a border crossing near Yuma, where he deprecated immigrants in language almost indistinguishable from Ted Cruz:

We’ve watched about 150 people come across in the last hour. They’re released into our country, and most of them are never seen or heard from again. There are people being drawn here. They’re being abused. This is not a good thing for our country.

To reinforce these rancid sentiments, Jr. then met with a group of Big Irrigators, and reiterated their outrageous claims about a “tsunami of migrants” defecating on their fields of arugula, broccoli and iceberg lettuce…

I met with local farmers Cory Mellon, Alex Mueller, Hank Auza, and Robert Barkley in Yuma, Arizona. Yuma County provides 90% of the green leafy vegetables, like iceberg lettuce, arugula, spinach, and broccoli, to American tables between November and April. The tsunami of migrants walking across farm fields and defecating in irrigation canals threatens the safety of that food supply. Last year, one of their neighbors had to plow under 88 acres of broccoli and personally absorb the $10k per acre cost after migrants tainted irrigation water.

Did Jr. stop for a moment to think that one of the reasons migrants are crossing the border to plant, tend and pick the crops grown by the Big Ag irrigators he’s palling around with is because they’ve sucked the Colorado River so dry in the American Southwest it no longer reaches the sea in Mexico?

Edward Abbey said some offensive things about migrants over the years, but never in the defense of desert grown arugula and the profits of Big Ag irrigators…

“Like a drunk Netanyahu.” That’s how our friend Sam Husseini described Kennedy’s performance during an appearance on Glenn Greenwald’s “System Update” show on Rumble, where his hawkish views on Israel (much like his father’s) popped out as aggressively as the monster in Alien. “Glenn’s questions were moderate,” Sam wrote. “Kennedy’s answers came off like incoherent propaganda. Like if Netanyahu were drunk. Arabs want to kill all Jews. No one ever claims Israel kills Palestinians intentionally. It comes off like a purpose of his campaign is to divide people skeptical of Covid propaganda from serious critics of US-Israeli axis.”

Over to you, Cornel (Now a Green) West.

+++

+ Last week as the smoke from the Quebec fires settled over the east coast,  200 air quality monitoring stations recorded all-time high air pollution. More than 100 million people were impacted by unhealthy levels of air pollution over the week.

+ Since the beginning of the year, more than 17,800 square miles have burned in Canada, far more than previous averages. The fires are expected to burn all summer.

+ On Monday of this week, nearly half a million acres of forests burned in Canada–scorching considerably more land in a single day than burned in California all of last year.

+ $125 billion: amount in lost annual earnings in US from workers exposed to drifting smoke from wildfires.

+ A new paper in PNAS by Marco Turco, John Abatzoglou, and Sixto Herrrera finds that in California “nearly all of the observed increase in burned area over the past half-century is attributable to anthropogenic climate change.”

+ Despite the preening of Justin Trudeau over his nation’s enlightened policies, Canada has the worst record on emissions reduction in the G7 since 1990.

+ In 2020, rich nations mobilized $83.3 billion for climate finance, but according to a new Oxfam analysis only $24.5 billion in new donor money actually went to climate projects.

+ Despite the fact that Columbia University’s oral history of the Obama administration is funded by the Obama Foundation, it still can’t salvage his pathetic record on climate change.

+ The Arctic Ocean will be ice-free a decade earlier than previously predicted.

+ Sea temperatures at a depth of about 10 meters were a quarter of a degree Celsius higher than ice-free oceans in May averaged across 1991 to 2020, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Year-round, long-term trends have added 0.6C to the ocean’s surface waters in 40 years. April also set a new record for heat.

+ The temperature of the North Atlantic is literally off-the-fucking-chart…

+ Since 1971, the Earth (largely its oceans)  has absorbed the heat equivalent of over 6 billion atomic explosions of the size that decimated Hiroshima in 1945.

+ Ken Saro-Wiwa’s killers are coming for us all…”Shell scrapped projects in offshore wind, hydrogen and biofuels, due to projections of weak returns. At the same time, Shell reported record profits of $40 billion last year on the back of strong oil and gas prices.”

+ Three decades after a federal law mandated the repatriation of Native human remains and funerary items, the state of Arizona still retains one-third of them in storage.

+ $21 million: the amount Indiana taxpayers had to shell out for the decontamination of gas stations owned by Mike Pence’s family after their company, Kiel Bros. Oil Co., went bankrupt in 2004.

+ The DuPont had evidence of the toxicity of PFAS, yet did not publish it in the scientific literature and failed to report the findings to the EPA. Internal documents were all marked as ‘confidential,’ and in some cases, industry executives were explicit that they “wanted this memo destroyed.”

+ The economic losses caused by the industrial clearing of the Amazon have amounted to around $317 billion a year, more than seven times higher than the revenues from commodity extraction.

+ Since 2008, the Earth has accumulated almost as much heat as it did in the previous 45 years, with most of the heat being absorbed into the oceans. One reason climatologists are expected a super-charged El Niño this year.

+ A new report co-published by Defend Our Health and Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Beyond Petrochemicals campaign demonstrates that PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) plastic bottles cause hazardous chemical pollution at every stage of their life cycle.”

+ State Farm–the insurance behemoth which says it will no longer sell new home insurance policies in California partly because of climate-fueled wildfire risks–has tens of billions of dollars invested in fossil fuels.

+ When mice ingest nanoplastics at the estimated human consumption dose, it took less than two months before they exhibited reduced cognition and short-term memory loses.

+ A Portland jury found the electric utility PacifiCorp culpable for causing the devastating fires in Oregon during the 2020 Labor Day weekend. The jury ordered the company to pay more than $70 million to 17 homeowners who sued and held it liable for broader damages that could raise the total award into the billions.

+ According to stats compiled by the Department of Energy, the average annual number of miles that a combination truck (a tractor with at least one trailer) was driven in 2021 was 62,229 miles. Single-unit trucks are more often driven locally or regionally, resulting in much lower average annual miles driven, only 12,306 miles in 2021.

+ $64.1 billion: the annual cost of maintaining the car-based economy of Massachusetts, most of it public money, according researchers at Harvard.

+ Apparently, Stephen Hawking wanted scientists to “make black holes” on Earth. But isn’t that what Shell, Exxon, Arch Coal and Peabody Energy have been doing for the last century?

+ + +

+ Garth Brooks on his new Nashville bar (Friends In Low Places Bar & Honky Tonk), which he says will be a safe space for trans people and Bud Lite drinkers: “Our thing is this: if you [are let] into this house, love one another. If you’re an asshole, there are plenty of other places on lower Broadway.”

+ The Free Speech Zone of Twitter determined that this quotation from Ginsberg’s America was “hateful content”. Matt? Bari? Hello? Anybody home?

+ This is silly. But the permanent ban Twitter imposed on our friend (and CP contributor) Susan Abulhawa, the Palestinian-American novelist (Mornings in Jenin), is yet another glaring example of the suppression of the most articulate voices speaking out for the dignity of Palestinian lives.

+ John Kruth describing his relationship with Ornette Coleman, the free jazz pioneer who gave Kruth his last interview:  “I loved going over to Ornette’s place and not just for the obvious reasons. He had a pool table in his Midtown Manhattan loft and before anything else could take place you had to oblige him and shoot a few rounds. Coleman was a tricky fellow, always a gentleman but a bit of a hustler too. He’d smile sweetly and nod his head gently as you take your shot. But sooner or later that congenial host façade would give way and at some point, he’d mop the floor with you – one game after the next, acting surprised the whole time, wondering where that “lucky shot” came from.”

+ Jennifer Coolidge: “I was a waitress, and I always fell in love with the angry chefs. I don’t know what it is. I just like the way they throw the food down. It was so sexy. They’d be like, ‘Take it. Just take it.’ And there’s something about a man who can do something fast.”

+ Monty Python couldn’t have done it any better…

Temperatures have passed 30C in London today, overwhelming some soldiers who took part in a military parade alongside Prince Williamhttps://t.co/McrUFliY2F pic.twitter.com/KAYXloNTvV

— ITV News (@itvnews) June 10, 2023

+ Some people seemed a little shocked by the news that retiring game show host Pat Sajak is now the chairman of the Board of Trustees for the rightwing Hillsdale College. But he’s served on the board of the Christian nationalist school (whose curriculum has been embraced as a model by Ron DeSantis, among others) since 2003. The best thing Sajak ever did was accidentally cut off Richard Nixon’s 1969 Xmas day broadcast to the troops. Sajak had taken over Adrian Cornauer’s Dawn Busters (“Good Morning, Vietnam”) radio show for the Armed Forces in Vietnam Network, when he pushed the wrong button and preempted Nixon’s speech. But he’s always been a political reactionary and long served on boards of the Claremont Institute and Eagle publishing.

+ In the 1970s, Thomas Pynchon was something of a vagabond: yo-yoing up and down the West Coast, looking like Frank Zappa, smelling like he’d spent a weekend with the Dead, leaving a trail of junk food in his wake. He slept in hammocks, on couches and in the beds of evicted children. After one night in the Oregon house of the writer Mary F. Beal (Amazon One and Angel’s Dance, two of the best feminist novels of the 70s), he issued a rare (for him) compliment: “People put me up in their kids’ rooms all the time, and hers (Beal’s daughter) is the first bed that doesn’t smell of urine.”

+ Greg Grandin: “Cormac McCarthy is dead. A tough read to be the empire’s muse, with little of the joy one finds in Melville. But he knew the US began with Mexico. Blood Meridian was End of Myth’s lodestar. ‘He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.'”

+ Number of copies Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian, sold before it was tossed into the remainder bins by its publisher: 1,883. If only DeSantis had been around to ban it, the book might have become a bestseller. (We’re not a literate, never mind literary, culture.)

+ Living with Cormac McCarthy:

McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. “We lived in total poverty,” says the second, Annie DeLisle, now a restaurateur in Florida. For nearly eight years they lived in a dairy barn outside Knoxville. “We were bathing in the lake,” she says with some nostalgia. “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

I Don’t Need to be Forgiven by Them People in the Neighborhood

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Ruminations
Kirkpatrick Sale
(Autonomedia)

Bodies Under Siege: How the Far Right’s Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global
Sian Norris
(Verso)

The Killer Whale Journals: Our Love and Fear of Orcas
Hanne Strager
(Johns Hopkins)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Live at Finlandia Hall, Helsinki, 1972
Sonny Rollins with the Heikki Sarmanto Trio
(Svart)

Weathervanes
Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit
(Southeastern)

Best of Me
Joanna Connor
(Gulf Coast)

Lost in a Mysterious Universe

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”  – Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

Seventeen Papua New Guinean schoolgirls who were kidnapped, raped and held hostage by armed men in Bosavi, Hela, last Wednesday were released yesterday.

The National’s source said they were released following a payment of 3300 kina (NZ$1500) and nine pigs as ransom to the gunmen.

“The females were released but they are traumatised. Some of them are just girls. It is the first time for them to be exposed to this kind of violence,” said the source.

• READ MORE: Armed gunmen kidnap 17 girls from remote PNG village – freed for ransom
• Two countries, two kidnappings – Port Moresby shows Jakarta how it’s done with 3 PNG hostages freed
• Marape clarifies kidnappers were paid K100,000 for freeing PNG hostages
• Other PNG kidnapping reports

“Meanwhile, the teachers of Walagu Primary School are still on the run, with the school closed since then.

“A female teacher who was seven months pregnant was airlifted by police to Komo in a chopper yesterday.”

Another government worker said: “Last week 40 armed men from Komo to Bosavi had accused the villagers for reporting them to police in the last kidnap incident [in February].

“They went to Komo passing through Walagu village near Mt Sisa.

‘Kidnapped at gunpoint’
“At Walagu, they kidnapped the females at gunpoint saying the villagers had assisted security forces and reported them to have involved in the kidnap of the New Zealand research scientist a few months back.

“They were held hostage at Mt Sisa for three days until their release yesterday.

“We are appealing to the Hela government to stop the smuggling of guns in the province.

“We also appeal to the authorities to arrest the 40 men from Bosavi, as they have raped our children who are between the ages of 13 to 15 and yet they demand a ransom.

“People in authority should meet with all its 24 council wards in Komo-Hulia electorate and arrest youths who have homemade guns in their possessions.”

Police sources also confirmed that the group seemed to be the same one that was involved in the earlier kidnap and ransom in February when the captives included an Australian-based New Zealand academic.

Lack of action ‘serious error’
The lack of follow up action by police and the military was a “serious error of judgement and appears to have emboldened them to continue with this kind of activities an easy money making venture”,  a police source said.

Meanwhile, condemnation of the action and calls for serious government action came from the Member for Koroba-Lake Kopiage, William Bando; the Vanimo Green MP and Chairman of Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence, Belden Namah; and the Lutheran Church Head, Dr Jack Urame.

Namah said last night that he was alarmed that the police hierarchy and the ministry had gone silent on a serious issue involving the lives of children.

Majeleen Yanei is a reporter with The National newspaper in Port Moresby. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

For many, the current hysteria among blindly bigoted, supposedly God-fearing troglodytes eerily echoes the white fear and hate that spewed forth during the Civil Rights Movement, when oppressed Black people dared to seek polite entry to the nation's schools and lunch counters. Today, the anti-trans/queer/other delirium has reached such fever pitch that a Texas school district just cancelled a planned field trip to see a theater production of James and the Giant Peach - wherein a young orphan boy escapes cruel relatives in a giant magic peach, embarks on a whirlwind, surreal journey with similarly giant magic insects, and learns about friendship and tolerance - because some of the actors dress as the other gender to play their insect and human parts. "We are keeping our son home (about) the drag queen role," parents squawked. Also, "Do you see how they are coming after our kids? They sneak it in!" and, "That's drag to me. It's all grooming no matter how you dissect it." Sigh.

Unimaginably, this is the bonkers, toxic environment in which first-term, duly elected, transgender Rep. Zooey Zephyr, representing 11,000 constituents in relatively liberal Missoula, has bravely fought to claim her place. From the moment the ugly GOP-controlled legislative session began, said one queer, Indigenous ally, "There are truly new lows being explored by the super-majority.” "There is such disdain, such animus, such disgust with queer people, Indigenous people, people that don’t fit in within their vision of what Montana is," he said, "they’re now weaponizing the institutions to exclude us." During last month's debate of a GOP bill to ban gender-affirming care for youth (because it's definitely the most vital issue facing the state), Zephyr was silenced when she argued GOP perpetrators would have “blood” on their hands" in the bill's tragic fallout. Afterwards, hundreds of outraged protesters showed up to chant, "Let her speak!" Capitol police in riot gear were deployed, seven people were arrested, and the GOP majority voted to ban Zephyr from the House floor for using "uncalled-for language."

Nevertheless, she persisted: Along with Montana's ACLU, Zephyr sued, arguing her censure violated her 1st Amendment rights, denied the right of her constituents to "just representation," and was a “direct threat to the bedrock principles that uphold our entire democracy.” She endured vicious harassment: Bigots taunted and misgendered her; mockingly posted pre-transition photos though she'd never hidden she was transgender; and, when her partner trans journalist Erin Reed announced she'd been "swatted" - calling in a SWAT team against an innocent target - the vitriol on "self-caused hate crimes" was savage: "Oh poor victim...On today's episode of 'Things That Didn't Happen'...What a narcissist." Meanwhile, a rabid GOP forged ahead with its anti-trans health bill, which the governor's own non-binary son denounced as "immoral, unjust (and) a violation of human rights.” They also passed an anti-drag bill so vague - no "parodic persona with glamorous or exaggerated costumes and make-up” - it could bar music concerts, Shakespeare plays, Halloween costumes and Lady Gaga.

After her banishment - though Speaker Matt Regier tried to stop her - Zephyr began working on a bench outside the chamber; an orange Post-It note declared the ad-hoc office Seat No. 31, her desk on the Floor. "I am here working on behalf of my constituents," she wrote, "as best I can given the undemocratic circumstances." This week, a judge put an abrupt end to the standoff by barring her return to the House, ruling he couldn't interfere with "legislative authority." The GOP called the decision "a win for the rule of law"; Zephyr slammed it as an "affront to democracy...(The) House is the People’s House, not Speaker Regier’s." At the same time, wives of GOP legislators began arriving early each day to park themselves on the bench Zephyr had been using; photos show them mean, smug, sneering like the racist crowds that met the Little Rock Nine and lunch counter warriors of the civil rights era. The resilient Zephyr calmly moved to a nearby lunch counter, where - irony alert - she stood. "Seat 31 has moved," she tweeted. "I'm up and ready to work. Plus, I hear standing desks are all the rage these days."

But her supporters were enraged by petty, hateful "Christo-fascist bigots" with such a "small, sad life." "Imagine telling your family, 'I'll be gone all day because I have to oppress (someone) my religion doesn't like,'" wrote one. Also, "JFC, did they tell her to get to the back of the bus too?" They swiftly organized revolving crews into a "Blue Bench Brigade" to arrive early each day, claim the spot, and "make sure @ZoAndBehold (is) surrounded by kind people who support her." Many celebrated the small, sweet action: "This. is. awesome" and "I never thought we’d be fighting over a bench, but here we are." A grateful Zephyr thanked the "lovely friends who saved me a spot" so "seat 31 is back to its home-away-from-home"; she thanked "folks who brought me the earrings and corsage," "everyone who sent flowers," those whose "love and support filled that room...I am carrying your kindness with me." When the Legislature abruptly adjourned, she was still in the hall, yet still sanguine: "Despite all the cruelties, I believe people saw a glimpse of what our country can be if we stand up for democracy & one another." A glimpse, just barely. God bless Zephyr's strength: She - we all - will need it.

She remained banned, but Zephr's desk overflowed with flowers sent by supporters.Twitter photo.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

Treatments are expensive, difficult to obtain and can require years of fighting unwilling doctors, red tape and familial disapproval. 

In recent months, a difficult process has become even harder, according to Chinese trans women who spoke to RFA. In December, the Chinese government banned on onlines sale of cyproterone acetate, a widely used antiandrogen drug, and estradiol, a widely used estrogen drug. 

The drugs are used in hormone therapies for a range of issues like prostate cancer and menopause. Both are needed for people who were born male to transition to female.

The government says the restriction was part of a process to add new safeguards to China’s relatively free-wheeling online drug market. But the ban is creating another problem for trans Chinese women: Many can’t find access to medicine through legitimate channels at all, driving them deeper into a black market where they are vulnerable to being scammed.

The situation has compounded a mental health crisis already gripping the community, leading to a rise in the number of suicides, trans women, known colloquially as “medicine girls,” told RFA.

As one of them, “Mel”, put it: "There's no way to survive. We can't survive. People are dying every day.” 

Already difficult 

It took Mel three years from the moment she walked through the doors of the hospital to obtain a certificate of diagnosis to begin the transition process to actually acquire it at 23. Without the approval of her immediate family, she had to travel overseas to have gender-confirming surgery. 

Mel, like other trans activists quoted in this story, requested to be identified by a pseudonym to protect herself from abuse and potential questioning by the Chinese police.

Being a transgender woman in China poses challenges in almost every aspect of life, she said – from discrimination in school and work, to the hardship of the physiological transition itself.

Treatments are expensive, and the process is costly in other ways. After Mel changed the gender on her ID card, the money for her social security, medical insurance and housing provident fund were removed. She needed to borrow money in order to make up for the loss.

But Mel’s hardships are less stark than those faced by other Chinese transgender women, she said – most are not even able to complete the transition process and have to rely on smuggled medications purchased online.

But since December, “the [new drug] policy directly blocked the way, leaving no way out,” Mel said.

Sales ban

Some transgender activists who spoke to RFA said they believe the new restrictions, which were imposed by the National Medical Products Administration, specifically target transgender people, while others speculated that they may be related to China's efforts to reverse its population decline by encouraging childbirth. 

Five other drugs that were banned alongside cyproterone acetate and estradiol are either contraceptives or abortion pills. 

Chinese authorities have not explained their reasoning behind the changes in any detail, as often happens with policy shifts in the country. In the documents accompanying the ban, the NMPA stated that the listed drugs are "high-risk" and are prohibited in order to "ensure the public to take drugs safely."

In 2021, Chinese media reported on a mother who discovered that her 15-year-old son was secretly purchasing and injecting hormone drugs to attempt gender transition, believing that he had been "lured by bad people" from the "medicine girl" online chat room. 

Local police set up a special investigation team after the mother reported her son. 

Regardless of the intent, the trans community has been deeply affected by the tighter controls on online sales.

Trans activists told RFA they have observed an increase in suicides since the ban’s implementation, and pleas for help have emerged in online chat rooms and social media posts where transgender women find support.

"There has been a marked increase in cases [of suicide], far more than in previous years during the same time period," said “Hanlianyi,” a trans activist who provides shelter and other forms of assistance to transgender women in China.

Greater acceptance, but hardships remain

In some ways, China has become a more accepting place for transgender people. There is a greater awareness of the issues they face, and even sympathetic stories from the country’s controlled media outlets. 

There is no official data from the government on the number of transgender people in China. 

In a 2014 article published in The Lancet medical journal, five Chinese surgeons estimated that there were approximately 400,000 transgender men and women in the country and suggested that less than 800 patients have been treated in the past 30 years.

In 2018, doctors at Peking University Third Hospital opened a transgender treatment clinic, followed in 2021 by Children's Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai.

But trans people say they still face widespread discrimination, as trans people do in other countries, including the United States.

In China, students with gender dysphoria can be suspended for being non-gender conforming, and trans adults have a hard time finding work. Trans people say they are routinely subjected to police and online surveillance due in part to the government’s suspicion of minority groups.

Nearly 93% of the respondents to the National Transgender Health Survey Report, released by the advocacy group, Beijing LGBT+, in 2021, said they had attempted to obtain a diagnosis related to gender dysphoria in China reported varying degrees of difficulty.

Researchers found a higher rate of suicide attempts, anxiety and depression levels, and psychological stress in the transgender community versus the general population. Among the survey respondents, 71.7% were found to be at risk of depression.

The mental health issues registered in the survey have been made worse, trans women told RFA, by the online drug sale ban.

‘Please help’

Trans women find support through platforms including QQ and on Twitter and Telegram, which are banned in China but still accessible with a VPN.

RFA learned of the crisis sparked by the online drug sales ban through social media accounts and online pleas for help. 

“Emergency!!! I know someone from the (transgender) community who has been off Androcur for 5 days and can't find candy,” a Jan. 23 Twitter post from a transgender woman said. “It's very urgent ... please help.”

Androcur, an antiandrogen medicine produced by Bayer, is illegal to import but is sometimes smuggled into the country. The nickname “candy” refers to androgen blockers and estrogen pills in general. 

(RFA is not disclosing the account handle as these accounts can be subject to reprisals, such as being scrutinized by police surveillance.)

People with prescriptions theoretically can still purchase their medicine in pharmacies, but trans women say they often face resistance when doing so. Some pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions for female hormone drugs – which are used in a variety of endocrine treatments – if the purchaser’s ID card refers to them as male, sources said. 

Many trans people also prefer the privacy of online purchases where there is less risk of having to endure humiliating encounters with pharmacists or other customers.

Dubious drug merchants

With little alternative, transgender women in China are turning to questionable online sellers that claim to have smuggled drugs from overseas, despite the ban. 

“Mika,” a transgender woman who has undergone gender reassignment surgery but still relies on estrogen, said online dealers charge around 300-400 yuan ($43-57) per box for Androcur, which can last for a little over a month.

But as the demand rises, more scammers are disguising themselves as drug merchants to con people out of money, only to send fake pills or nothing at all.

The consequences for trans women can be deadly. One of Hanlianyi’s friends took her own life after paying about 1,200 yuan ($172) for drugs that were never delivered, she said. 

"Being cheated is often the last straw that breaks the camel's back," she said.

The trans women RFA spoke with said various strategies are passed around online in response to the drug ban, including taking veterinary hormone pills that are easier to acquire or trying to purchase the raw materials and fashion a facsimile of the medicine themselves. 

In October “Hilda,” a transgender woman, started to use her own body as a lab to make a gel containing estradiol.

"I have achieved self-sufficiency and can also help some people," she told RFA.

Hilda said she knew about 10 other transgender women who began to make their own drugs between November and February. 

Extreme responses

The obstacles trangender women face have led some to take action even more extreme, including self-castration, according to the women who spoke to RFA, news reports and social media posts. 

“Felicity,” a transgender activist who grew up in China but now lives overseas, said before the recent online sales ban a woman live-streamed the process in a group chat, prompting a frantic online effort to send help to stem the bleeding.

Chinese media have also reported some transgender women in the country have operated on themselves or others. 

In one case, a transgender woman helped another with surgery after having successfully removed her own testicles; in another, an individual was sentenced for illegally practicing medicine without proper qualifications. 

"If a time comes when candy becomes completely unavailable, going abroad is not an option, and black market surgery in China is out of reach, I will provide a guide on self-castration,” a Feb. 11 tweet from a transgender woman said. “So, fret not, there is always a solution, right?" 

In an Apr. 20 tweet, the woman said she had performed the self-castration and included a photograph of her on a bloody bed with surgical instruments nearby. But she added that she had almost died during the procedure and warned transgender women not to follow suit.

Activists Felicity and Hanlianyi told RFA that they fear the online sales ban will lead to more incidents of self-castration.

‘We can’t survive’

Previously, Mel said she has turned down interview requests from foreign journalists because she believed the Chinese government would address the problems. 

Now, she’s begun to speak out.

She and her friends recently created a webpage to raise awareness of the consequences of the online sales ban, which is now in its fifth month.

It includes references to instances of transgender women being targeted by police and a running tally of people whom Mel says have taken their own lives since the start of the year. 

The last count, posted on the page a month ago, was 91.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Mary Zhao for RFA.

• House Republicans approve bill banning transgender athletes in most women’s or girl’s school sports
• Julie Su’s nomination to serve as Labor Secretary faces opposition from Republicans and big business — and maybe some Democrats
• Attorney John Burris files federal civil rights lawsuit against Antioch and its police department
• Attorney Generals in 17 states want a recall of Kia and Hyundai cars because they’re too easy to steal

The post House Republicans vote to ban transgender students from women’s and girl’s school sports; Labor Secretary nominee Julie Su faces Republican opposition at confirmation hearing; Federal civil rights lawsuit filed against Antioch and its police department: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – April 20, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

The post Girls Don’t Kill: Dissecting the Gender of Violence After Nashville appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

Twitter handle हम लोग We The People, which often shares misinformation, shared this video with a similar caption. The tweet has over one lakh views at the time of the writing of this article.

कोल्डड्रिंक में शराब पी रही पापा की परियों को पुलिस ने पकडा .. फिर उसके बाद देखिए क्या हुआ pic.twitter.com/avmAFmJCzb

— हम लोग We The People (@ajaychauhan41) April 10, 2023

A news channel called KBC News Katihar from Bihar also uploaded a video report on their Facebook page regarding the viral video. The video has over a thousand views at the moment.

Many social media users have shared the video suggesting it depicts a genuine incident. All the posts have the same caption on Twitter and Facebook.

Fact Check

By breaking down the viral video into keyframes and reverse-searching one of them, Alt News came across the video uploaded in its entirety on a Facebook channel called Hulchul TV, which has a history of uploading scripted viral videos. In the caption, the video is credited to a page called Amar Kataria Offical. The full video is 11.18-minute long.

Taking a clue from this, Alt News searched for Amar Kataria on Facebook and Instagram and found out that he is an actor that often posts such videos. The latest and also the most popular video posted by him was the one that is viral.

As one can see above, the description of the video says, यह वीडियो सामाजिक जागरूकता के लिए बनाई गई है इसका वास्तिवका से कोई तालुक नहीं है इस वीडियो में परफॉर्म करने वाले सभी कलाकार है और यह वीडियो स्क्रिप्टेड है | (This video is made for social awareness. It has nothing to do with reality. All the persons performing in this video are artists and it is scripted.)

While browsing through his Facebook profile, Alt News stumbled upon a Live sesion from January 1, 2023. In this, he greets his audience and describes himself as “Haryanvi Kalaakar” or an Artist from Haryana.

His Instagram bio describes him as an Actor and also found a YouTube channel called Kataria Films.  

Therefore, the video viral on social media about a police officer chasing down a car for rash driving and arguing with supposedly drunk girls is actually a scripted video from a content creator called Amar Kataria from Haryana. His Facebook and YouTube channels and Instagram profile have many such scripted videos.

Vansh Shah is an intern at Alt News.

The post Scripted video of cop chasing and rebuking drunk girls in car viral as real appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Vansh Shah.

Both the Biden administration and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are facing criticism this week for proposals related to restricting transgender athletes from participating in sports teams and events that align with their gender identity.

While the House GOP's bill is explicitly designed to exclude trans women and girls, the Biden administration's pending rule aims to "provide needed clarity, in response to questions from stakeholders, on how recipients can ensure that students have equal opportunity to participate on male and female athletic teams as required by Title IX."

Title IX is a 1972 federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in education programs and activities that receive federal funding.

As a U.S. Department of Education fact sheet on the administration's proposal details:

Under the proposed regulation, schools would not be permitted to adopt or apply a one-size-fits-all policy that categorically bans transgender students from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity.

Instead, the department's approach would allow schools flexibility to develop team eligibility criteria that serve important educational objectives, such as ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury. These criteria would have to account for the sport, level of competition, and grade or education level to which they apply. These criteria could not be premised on disapproval of transgender students or a desire to harm a particular student. The criteria also would have to minimize harms to students whose opportunity to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity would be limited or denied.

"What I would say is think about intent versus impact," Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D-100) toldVICE. "I think there is intent from the Biden administration to protect trans athletes but you can't reconcile that intent with the fact that this policy opens the potential pathway for discrimination."

Zephyr is among 14 transgender and nonbinary state legislators who on Monday sent a letter to President Joe Biden highlighting legislative attacks on trans athletes—20 states have passed sports bans and over 450 anti-trans bills have been put forth this year—and detailing their concerns with his administration's proposed changes to Title IX.

"While we understand the administration may have been attempting to provide legal protections and clarity, in actuality these proposed rule changes will simply provide those who seek to deny us our rights a roadmap for how to do so," the lawmakers wrote. "To put it plainly, there is not such thing as an acceptable 'compromise' that limits transgender Americans access to equal rights."

"Trans athletes belong in sports," they argued. "When discussing questions around fairness in sports, rather than granting credence to false narratives around the supposed advantages of trans athletes, we should instead be asking why trans people are so deeply underrepresented—in their participation, in their successes, and in athletic scholarships."

The lawmakers called on the administration to work with transgender legislators, lawyers, and activists "to revise this proposed policy in a way that allows trans people to fully participate in the sports of their choosing, and does not perpetuate unfounded and harmful claims about trans athletes."

As state legislators from Colorado, Delaware, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Vermont wrote to Biden, professional, Olympic, and Paralympic athletes on the same day took aim at the House GOP bill.

The so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act (H.R. 734) was reintroduced by Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) in February and received a hearing by the GOP-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce last month.

The new letter from critics of the bill was organized by Athlete Ally, which works to end homophobia and transphobia in sports.

"As professional, Olympic, and Paralympic athletes, we have dedicated our lives to sports," the letter states. "Sports have given us our greatest friends, taught us incredible life lessons, and given us the confidence and drive to succeed in the world. Those of us who love sport know that its value goes far beyond the playing field, to developing a sense of self and identity, and reflecting what we value as a community. Sport is a tremendous outlet for physical and mental health, teaches valuable lessons on teamwork and discipline, and has brought us lifelong community. Every single child should have access to the lifesaving power of sports."

If H.R. 734 passes, "transgender and intersex girls and women throughout the country will be forced to sit on the sidelines, away from their peers and their communities," the athletes warned. "Furthermore, the policing of who can and cannot play school sports will very likely lead to the policing of the bodies of all girls, including cisgender girls. This will deter girls from participating in sports and create additional barriers. Denying children access to a place where they can gain significant mental and physical health benefits, and learn lifelong lessons that come from being part of a team and working hard towards your goals does not protect women in sports."

"We believe that gender equity in sport is critical, which is why we urge policymakers to turn their attention and effort to the causes women athletes have been fighting for decades, including equal pay, an end to abuse and mistreatment, uneven implementation of Title IX, and a lack of access and equity for girls of color and girls with disabilities, to name only a few," the letter concludes. "Our deepest hope is that transgender and intersex kids will never have to feel the isolation, exclusion, and othering that H.R. 734 is seeking to enshrine into law."

Signatories include Abby Dunkin, a Paralympic gold medalist in wheelchair basketball; Olympic and professional soccer player Megan Rapinoe; Olympic and professional basketball player Sue Bird; trans powerlifter JayCee Cooper; Patricio Manuel, the first trans boxer to compete professionally; and CeCe Telfer, who as a track and field athlete at Franklin Pierce University was the first trans person to win a National Collegiate Athletic Association title.

"I'm proud to have signed onto this open letter in support of trans and intersex youth and against H.R. 734," Telfer tweeted. "Every child deserves the right to play the sport they love."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Both the Biden administration and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are facing criticism this week for proposals related to restricting transgender athletes from participating in sports teams and events that align with their gender identity.

While the House GOP's bill is explicitly designed to exclude trans women and girls, the Biden administration's pending rule aims to "provide needed clarity, in response to questions from stakeholders, on how recipients can ensure that students have equal opportunity to participate on male and female athletic teams as required by Title IX."

Title IX is a 1972 federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in education programs and activities that receive federal funding.

As a U.S. Department of Education fact sheet on the administration's proposal details:

Under the proposed regulation, schools would not be permitted to adopt or apply a one-size-fits-all policy that categorically bans transgender students from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity.

Instead, the department's approach would allow schools flexibility to develop team eligibility criteria that serve important educational objectives, such as ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury. These criteria would have to account for the sport, level of competition, and grade or education level to which they apply. These criteria could not be premised on disapproval of transgender students or a desire to harm a particular student. The criteria also would have to minimize harms to students whose opportunity to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity would be limited or denied.

"What I would say is think about intent versus impact," Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D-100) toldVICE. "I think there is intent from the Biden administration to protect trans athletes but you can't reconcile that intent with the fact that this policy opens the potential pathway for discrimination."

Zephyr is among 14 transgender and nonbinary state legislators who on Monday sent a letter to President Joe Biden highlighting legislative attacks on trans athletes—20 states have passed sports bans and over 450 anti-trans bills have been put forth this year—and detailing their concerns with his administration's proposed changes to Title IX.

"While we understand the administration may have been attempting to provide legal protections and clarity, in actuality these proposed rule changes will simply provide those who seek to deny us our rights a roadmap for how to do so," the lawmakers wrote. "To put it plainly, there is not such thing as an acceptable 'compromise' that limits transgender Americans access to equal rights."

"Trans athletes belong in sports," they argued. "When discussing questions around fairness in sports, rather than granting credence to false narratives around the supposed advantages of trans athletes, we should instead be asking why trans people are so deeply underrepresented—in their participation, in their successes, and in athletic scholarships."

The lawmakers called on the administration to work with transgender legislators, lawyers, and activists "to revise this proposed policy in a way that allows trans people to fully participate in the sports of their choosing, and does not perpetuate unfounded and harmful claims about trans athletes."

As state legislators from Colorado, Delaware, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Vermont wrote to Biden, professional, Olympic, and Paralympic athletes on the same day took aim at the House GOP bill.

The so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act (H.R. 734) was reintroduced by Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) in February and received a hearing by the GOP-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce last month.

The new letter from critics of the bill was organized by Athlete Ally, which works to end homophobia and transphobia in sports.

"As professional, Olympic, and Paralympic athletes, we have dedicated our lives to sports," the letter states. "Sports have given us our greatest friends, taught us incredible life lessons, and given us the confidence and drive to succeed in the world. Those of us who love sport know that its value goes far beyond the playing field, to developing a sense of self and identity, and reflecting what we value as a community. Sport is a tremendous outlet for physical and mental health, teaches valuable lessons on teamwork and discipline, and has brought us lifelong community. Every single child should have access to the lifesaving power of sports."

If H.R. 734 passes, "transgender and intersex girls and women throughout the country will be forced to sit on the sidelines, away from their peers and their communities," the athletes warned. "Furthermore, the policing of who can and cannot play school sports will very likely lead to the policing of the bodies of all girls, including cisgender girls. This will deter girls from participating in sports and create additional barriers. Denying children access to a place where they can gain significant mental and physical health benefits, and learn lifelong lessons that come from being part of a team and working hard towards your goals does not protect women in sports."

"We believe that gender equity in sport is critical, which is why we urge policymakers to turn their attention and effort to the causes women athletes have been fighting for decades, including equal pay, an end to abuse and mistreatment, uneven implementation of Title IX, and a lack of access and equity for girls of color and girls with disabilities, to name only a few," the letter concludes. "Our deepest hope is that transgender and intersex kids will never have to feel the isolation, exclusion, and othering that H.R. 734 is seeking to enshrine into law."

Signatories include Abby Dunkin, a Paralympic gold medalist in wheelchair basketball; Olympic and professional soccer player Megan Rapinoe; Olympic and professional basketball player Sue Bird; trans powerlifter JayCee Cooper; Patricio Manuel, the first trans boxer to compete professionally; and CeCe Telfer, who as a track and field athlete at Franklin Pierce University was the first trans person to win a National Collegiate Athletic Association title.

"I'm proud to have signed onto this open letter in support of trans and intersex youth and against H.R. 734," Telfer tweeted. "Every child deserves the right to play the sport they love."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Sharing this letter on Twitter, a user wrote in Hindi, “Hindu boys, make Muslim girl fall in love with you in college and office, and establish physical relation with her so that she gets ready to leave her family and run away. You will be given 5 lakh help to settle down: RSS;” The tweet also uses the hashtag ‘#bhagwalovetrap’. (Archive)

हिन्दू लडकें कॉलेज,ऑफिस में मुस्लिम लड़की को प्यार में फसाओ उससे शारीरिक सम्बन्ध बनाओ ताकि वो अपने परिवार को छोड़ कर भागने के लिए तय्यार हो जाए उसे 5लाख की मदद दी जाएगी घर बसने में:RSS;
पूरा पड़िए और अपने बहन बेटिओं और सभी मुसलमानों को भेजिए,
अल्लाह हिफाज़त फार्मा#bhagwalovetrap pic.twitter.com/aqQ6Mp1H1C

— StopLoveTrap (@savemuslimgirls) April 8, 2023

Mohammad Tanvir, who claims to be a journalist, also shared this letter with a caption in Hindi that reads, “Read this letter and open your eyes Muslim girls, how RSS is turning you into a dead body. Taking advantage of your innocence…” (Archive)

ये लेटर पढ़ो और आँखे खोलो मुस्लिम बच्चियों, कैसे RSS तुम को मुर्दत बना रहा है।

तुम्हारे भोलेपन का फायदा उठा रहा है।

अगर ऐसा लेटर किसी मुस्लिम संगठन ने जारी कर दिया होता तो अब तक TV पर डिबेट हो रहा होता,
संगठन के लोग जेल मे होते,
इसे हिन्दू समाज पर हमला बता दिया गया होता।
1/2 pic.twitter.com/9eUrSHVsrJ

— Mohammad Tanvir تنوير (@TanveerPost) April 8, 2023

Other Twitter users sharing this letter include @Tarannum2_, @BinT_E_Adam____, @noor_alam22, verified Twitter blue user Shahavaj Anjum, and Hamza Siddiqui.

A translated version of the content of the letter is also circulating on WhatsApp (here and here).

The conspiracy of converting Muslim girls into Hinduism and ruine their life :

– whenever you meet a Muslim girl, pose itself as a good guy with great character.

– Always try to shake hands whenever you meet in office, college, wedding or any place where Muslim girls. 1/n pic.twitter.com/0FOdmqQCdP

— Gabbar (@Gabbar0099) April 8, 2023

Alt News received multiple requests on its WhatsApp helpline (7600011160) to fact-check the authenticity of the letter.

Fact Check

At the very first glance at the letter, we noticed some anomalies. It is without any date or sender’s name. It ends just by saying, “Copy – Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Samaj, Bajrang Dal, Hindu Sena, Hindu Yuva Vahini, Samast Hindu Samaj.”

We then performed a keyword search on Twitter and came across three letters issued by the RSS in the past that carried a format similar to the letter in circulation. We noted that the viral letter had some fundamental differences when compared to the letters issued via the official channels of the RSS. Below we have provided a comparison.

1. The logos at the top-left corner don’t match. In fact, the original RSS letter carries a motto at the bottom of the logo that reads, “संघे शक्ति: कलौयुगे”, which is missing in the letter in circulation.
2. The address on the letterhead written in blue font is aligned to the right in the original letter, but this is not the case in the viral letter. The original letter also carries the word “Bharat” in brackets.

Though each letter issued by the RSS has a different style of writing where the date might appear at the top or the bottom, this viral letter does not carry any date, as noted earlier.

We also found that in 2018 and 2019, fake letters with similar formats were circulated in the name of RSS. Upon taking a close look we noticed that those letters as well did not carry any date of publication.

In addition to all of the above information, we noticed that spelling mistakes as well as incomplete sentences too were part of the viral letter.

• In point number four, the word ‘message’ (मैसेज) is written as ‘massage’ (मसाज).
• The ninth point in the text has an incomplete word, it reads, “लड़की से अपने प्यार का इजहार करने का अच्छा मौका तलाश और उसे बताएं कि आप पर कोई दबाव नहीं है”. It should actually read, “लड़की से अपने प्यार का इजहार करने का अच्छा मौका तलाशें और उसे बताएं कि आप पर कोई दबाव नहीं है”

[Translation: Find a good opportunity to express your love to the girl and let her know that you are not under any pressure.]

Additionally, we performed multiple keyword searches to find any news reports related to this letter but we could not find any. Based on all the pieces of evidence, it is safe to conclude that the letter in circulation is inauthentic. The letter does carry many of the elements that are usually seen in official letters issued by the RSS, but upon a close look, it is evident that these elements were added haphazardly.

The post Fake RSS letter on how Hindu boys should ‘entrap’ Muslim girls viral appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.

Sharing this letter on Twitter, a user wrote in Hindi, “Hindu boys, make Muslim girl fall in love with you in college and office, and establish physical relation with her so that she gets ready to leave her family and run away. You will be given 5 lakh help to settle down: RSS;” The tweet also uses the hashtag ‘#bhagwalovetrap’. (Archive)

हिन्दू लडकें कॉलेज,ऑफिस में मुस्लिम लड़की को प्यार में फसाओ उससे शारीरिक सम्बन्ध बनाओ ताकि वो अपने परिवार को छोड़ कर भागने के लिए तय्यार हो जाए उसे 5लाख की मदद दी जाएगी घर बसने में:RSS;
पूरा पड़िए और अपने बहन बेटिओं और सभी मुसलमानों को भेजिए,
अल्लाह हिफाज़त फार्मा#bhagwalovetrap pic.twitter.com/aqQ6Mp1H1C

— StopLoveTrap (@savemuslimgirls) April 8, 2023

Mohammad Tanvir, who claims to be a journalist, also shared this letter with a caption in Hindi that reads, “Read this letter and open your eyes Muslim girls, how RSS is turning you into a dead body. Taking advantage of your innocence…” (Archive)

ये लेटर पढ़ो और आँखे खोलो मुस्लिम बच्चियों, कैसे RSS तुम को मुर्दत बना रहा है।

तुम्हारे भोलेपन का फायदा उठा रहा है।

अगर ऐसा लेटर किसी मुस्लिम संगठन ने जारी कर दिया होता तो अब तक TV पर डिबेट हो रहा होता,
संगठन के लोग जेल मे होते,
इसे हिन्दू समाज पर हमला बता दिया गया होता।
1/2 pic.twitter.com/9eUrSHVsrJ

— Mohammad Tanvir تنوير (@TanveerPost) April 8, 2023

Other Twitter users sharing this letter include @Tarannum2_, @BinT_E_Adam____, @noor_alam22, verified Twitter blue user Shahavaj Anjum, and Hamza Siddiqui.

A translated version of the content of the letter is also circulating on WhatsApp (here and here).

The conspiracy of converting Muslim girls into Hinduism and ruine their life :

– whenever you meet a Muslim girl, pose itself as a good guy with great character.

– Always try to shake hands whenever you meet in office, college, wedding or any place where Muslim girls. 1/n pic.twitter.com/0FOdmqQCdP

— Gabbar (@Gabbar0099) April 8, 2023

Alt News received multiple requests on its WhatsApp helpline (7600011160) to fact-check the authenticity of the letter.

Fact Check

At the very first glance at the letter, we noticed some anomalies. It is without any date or sender’s name. It ends just by saying, “Copy – Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Samaj, Bajrang Dal, Hindu Sena, Hindu Yuva Vahini, Samast Hindu Samaj.”

We then performed a keyword search on Twitter and came across three letters issued by the RSS in the past that carried a format similar to the letter in circulation. We noted that the viral letter had some fundamental differences when compared to the letters issued via the official channels of the RSS. Below we have provided a comparison.

1. The logos at the top-left corner don’t match. In fact, the original RSS letter carries a motto at the bottom of the logo that reads, “संघे शक्ति: कलौयुगे”, which is missing in the letter in circulation.
2. The address on the letterhead written in blue font is aligned to the right in the original letter, but this is not the case in the viral letter. The original letter also carries the word “Bharat” in brackets.

Though each letter issued by the RSS has a different style of writing where the date might appear at the top or the bottom, this viral letter does not carry any date, as noted earlier.

We also found that in 2018 and 2019, fake letters with similar formats were circulated in the name of RSS. Upon taking a close look we noticed that those letters as well did not carry any date of publication.

In addition to all of the above information, we noticed that spelling mistakes as well as incomplete sentences too were part of the viral letter.

• In point number four, the word ‘message’ (मैसेज) is written as ‘massage’ (मसाज).
• The ninth point in the text has an incomplete word, it reads, “लड़की से अपने प्यार का इजहार करने का अच्छा मौका तलाश और उसे बताएं कि आप पर कोई दबाव नहीं है”. It should actually read, “लड़की से अपने प्यार का इजहार करने का अच्छा मौका तलाशें और उसे बताएं कि आप पर कोई दबाव नहीं है”

[Translation: Find a good opportunity to express your love to the girl and let her know that you are not under any pressure.]

Additionally, we performed multiple keyword searches to find any news reports related to this letter but we could not find any. Based on all the pieces of evidence, it is safe to conclude that the letter in circulation is inauthentic. The letter does carry many of the elements that are usually seen in official letters issued by the RSS, but upon a close look, it is evident that these elements were added haphazardly.

The post Fake RSS letter on how Hindu boys should ‘entrap’ Muslim girls viral appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.

The tweet has received more than 1.2 lakh views and has gone viral.

The video was also shared on Facebook.

Fact Check

By reverse searching one of the key-frames of the viral video, Alt News came across an Instagram post by Aware India, an NGO that works on women’s empowerment. The caption of the video, written in Tamil, mentions a boarding school of the Kalvarayan tribe in Tamil Nadu and the name of writer Geetha Ilangovan.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by AWARE India (@awareindia2020)

Geetha Ilangovan is the author of the book ‘Dupatta Podunga Thozhi’ (Put on a Scarf, My Friend), a collection of 30 essays. When Alt News reached out to her, she told us about a campaign undertaken by Aware India to reach out to rural tribal young girls and women of Tamil Nadu and educate them about feminism and body positivity. She added that child marriage was prevalent in Tamil Nadu and the state government, along with various NGOs, was trying to educate girls about the ills of it.

“Recently, several books of contemporary Tamil feminist literature were distributed among students in schools across Tamil Nadu. My book was one of them. When I arrived at this specific school in Kallakurichi of Tamil Nadu, the children were excited to welcome me. They did so by discarding their dupattas out of the windows, as a  symbolic gesture of fighting sexism,” Geetha said, adding, “this had nothing to do with any sort of protest against North Indian attire or anything like that.”

The author also informed us that a three-day camp was being held at the school and she visited it on the second day. On Day 1, author Nivedita Louis had interacted with the students and it was there that the idea of welcoming Geetha by flinging the dupattas originated.

“When Nivedita asked them what books they had read, they mentioned my book, Dupatta Podunga Thozhi. They said they had could related to it because they also found that their family and people around them would force them to wear a dupatta. Then Nivedita suggested that when I would there the following day, they could throw down their scarves to welcome me. It was discussed in a lighthearted manner, but the girls fancied the idea and actually did it,” Geetha told Alt News.

We noticed that The Quint posted the video on its YouTube channel and and said that the students had thrown their scarves away to greet the author. The author (clad in yellow) can be seen waving at the students expressing her amusement at the gesture.

In an article titled ‘Off With the Dupattas: Why TN Tribal Students Discarded Scarves To Beat Sexism‘, The Quint said, “On 13 March, a school in Kallakurichi of Tamil Nadu witnessed an unusual event, visuals of which have now gone viral – girl students of eight schools discarded their dupattas from atop a three-storied building to greet a woman author, Geeta Ilangovan.” It adds, “The author… was surprised to see scarves of different hues being flung down from the building as the students mouthed a collective greeting – ‘Hi’. The gesture harboured both cultural and gender connotations, Ilangovan said.”

Therefore, the claim by Ashok Swain about young girls in Tamil Nadu protesting against ‘North Indian and patriarchal’ school uniform by throwing scarves out of their classrooms is false. They were actually greeting author Geetha Ilangovan at their school.

Vansh Shah is an intern with Alt News.

The post Video of TN girls throwing down scarves to greet author viral with misleading claim appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Vansh Shah.

Iranian parents and teachers have been holding protests in Tehran and other cities following a spate of apparent poisonings at girls’ schools since November. According to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran, there have been at least 290 suspected school poisonings in recent months, sickening at least 7,000 students with symptoms including headaches, fatigue and more. Meanwhile, the head of the country’s judiciary said earlier this week that Iranian women could be punished for violating the Islamic dress code. His remarks came just months after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody sparked nationwide protests. For more on women’s rights in Iran, we speak with Manijeh Moradian, assistant professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Barnard College, author of This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States and part of the Feminists for Jina network.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

A top United Nations official said Wednesday that “Afghanistan under the Taliban remains the most repressive country in the world regarding women’s rights.” Since taking power nearly 19 months ago, the Taliban has moved systematically to erase women from public life by banning women and girls from schools, from working with nongovernmental organizations and from traveling without a male relative. “Afghanistan is now effectively one of the biggest prisons in the world for women,” says Zahra Nader, a freelance Afghan journalist who was formerly a reporter for The New York Times in Kabul and is now based in Canada. She is the editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a new Afghan women-led outlet documenting human rights issues in Afghanistan.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns teen girls face record levels of depression and hopelessness, we host a roundtable on the role of social media and a bipartisan push against Big Tech in Congress. Several child safety-focused bills to curtail children’s exposure to harmful online interactions are being proposed this session. Critics say the measures may not actually help children while limiting speech and privacy rights. We are joined by three people who testified last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee: Emma Lembke, a college student and founder of the LOG OFF movement, which promotes healthy social media use among teens; Mitch Prinstein, professor of psychology and neuroscience and chief science officer at the American Psychological Association; and Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a consumer advocacy group dedicated to ending marketing targeted at children.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

In support of this week’s Education Cannot Wait conference in Geneva and its call for learning support in emergencies, Somaya has been speaking to UN News’s Daniel Johnson. She strongly believes education can help change discriminatory views about girls, women and their place in society.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Daniel Johnson.

Child development experts and other advocates said Monday that new federal data regarding the struggles of adolescents in the United States should serve as an urgent call to action, as teenage girls reported facing rising levels of sexual violence as well as suicidal thoughts and depression in a survey taken by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC's biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which was given to 17,000 teenagers at public and private high schools across the U.S. in 2021, found that nearly 1 in 3 adolescent girls seriously considered suicide that year—representing an increase of 60% over the previous decade.

Thirteen percent said they had attempted suicide in the past year, while 7% of boys reported the same, and 57% of girls said they felt persistently sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row—"a possible indication of the experience of depressive symptoms," according to the CDC report.

"If you think about every 10 teen girls that you know, at least one and possibly more has been raped, and that is the highest level we've ever seen."

Among teenagers the CDC identified as LGBQ+, 69% reported feeling persistent sadness for at least two weeks in a row. The study did not specifically address the challenges faced by transgender students.

Twenty-two percent of LGBQ+ adolescents said they had attempted suicide.

Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health, toldThe Washington Post that high rates of depression and suicidal ideation among teenage girls was "almost certainly" linked to another finding in the survey: 14% of girls reported that they had been forced to have sex—an increase of 27% since the last time the survey was taken in 2019.

"If you think about every 10 teen girls that you know, at least one and possibly more has been raped, and that is the highest level we've ever seen," Ethier told The Post. "We are really alarmed."

The rate of sexual assault was even higher among LGBQ+ teenagers, with 20% reporting they had been forced to have sex.

Regarding the hopelessness and desperation evident among LGBQ+ teenagers, Dr. Scott Hadland, chief of adolescent medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital said he was "sadly" unsurprised, considering the wave of legislative attacks on transgender and gender-nonconforming Americans, including youths.

"When we legislate against LGBTQ+ teens & their families, they're listening, internalizing, and struggling," said Hadland.

Educator and advocate Cathy Davidson pointed out that depression, suicidal ideation, and increased sexual violence directed at girls all come amid "assaults on women's rights to their bodies" in state legislatures across the country. Dozens of abortion restrictions were imposed in 2021.

The study did not include an accounting of what is behind the rise in sexual violence against teens, be it violence happening at home, at school, or in intimate relationships.

"It's really important to disentangle the relationships between the perpetrators and the victim-survivors to better understand the reasons why," Heather Hlavka, an associate professor of criminology and law studies at Marquette University, told The Post.

The CDC's recommendations focused on what policymakers and schools can do to better support teenagers, including implementing quality health education, improving school-based services for students who are struggling, and increasing school connectedness by providing "with social and emotional learning programs in early grades and youth development programs in middle and high school" and "professional development to educators on classroom management."

"These data make it clear," reads the report, "that young people in the U.S. are collectively experiencing a level of distress that calls on us to act."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Valentines Day, for me, is that Vagina Monologues. Sure, we are on the brink of nuclear disaster with this great Grand Old Flag land pushing and pulling for Russia responses for all that shaking going on in Ukraine and Russia.

Published in over 48 languages, performed in over 140 countries and recently heralded by The New York Times as one of the most important plays of the past 25 years: Ensler’s hilarious, eye-opening tour into the last frontier, the forbidden zone at the heart of every woman. A show that’s rocked audiences around the world, this groundbreaking piece gives voice to a chorus of lusty, outrageous, poignant, and thoroughly human stories, transforming the question mark hovering over the anatomy into a permanent victory sign. With laughter and compassion, Ensler transports her audiences to a world we’ve never dared to know, guaranteeing that no one who reads The Vagina Monologues will ever look at a woman’s body the same way again.

Performing The Vagina Monologues inspired her to create V-Day, the 22-year-old global activist movement to end violence against all women (cisgender and transgender), those who hold fluid identities, nonbinary people, girls and the planet.

The movement has grown, unfortunately, since violence against girls and women continues. Acid throwing freaks. Rapists that get off scott free. The dirty Netflix shows of sex-ploitation and exploitation. It is a seesaw world, with more and more women excelling in college/university, in sciences, in other arenas, some not so hunkydory:

In 2011, City of Joy opened its doors in Eastern Congo with the goal of building a peaceful and transformational community for women survivors of violence.

V-Day is not Just a Valentine for your Sweetheart

Okay, so this newspaper is almost down for the count, limited to a once-a-week hard copy publication. Therefore, I know my viewpoints better be good, hard hitting and relevant.

Not all topics are going to be warm and fuzzy. On this Valentine’s day, attempt to think about violence against women. The significance of V-Day is a response against violence toward women, girls and the planet. Here in Lincoln County women and girls face all levels of violence.

The V-Day movement is tied a 1996 one-woman play written by Eve Ensler, called the Vagina Monologues. She interviewed more than 200 women from a wide range of ages and cultural backgrounds, whereupon so many of them opened up, baring their souls tied to sexual violence.

One key question was, “What would your vagina say if it could talk?” Over the years, V-Day has become a catalyst promoting creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations.

The Monologues also generates broader attention to stop violence against women and girls.

So what’s a white male writer stepping his toes into these waters? First, let me say that if you read the police blotter in this county, or if you attend public criminal hearings at the courthouse, you will see the level of violence in the household in general is skyrocketing.

Police calls cover the gamut, but one ugly reality is the number of spousal violence calls, especially violence against wives and girlfriends. My own early roots as a reporter in Tucson were ensconced into the music scene and the police beat. That entailed covering a special rape squad set up by Linda Ronstadt’s brother Peter who was the Tucson police chief for more than 10 years.

I was 19 covering a lot of sexual violence against both students and young/old women living around the University of Arizona campus. I covered Take Back the Night rallies – started in the early 1970s in Belgium, but quickly spreading to college campuses and across global communities: from remote Canadian towns to bustling Calcutta streets, from Ivy Leagues to military bases.

While doing my judo and scuba diving thing, I also took a few feminist literature classes, volunteered with Rape Crisis organization, and assisted my sensei with grappling classes, as in self-defense for women.

Fast forward to Spokane, Washington: I was teaching at many venues as a composition and writing instructor, to include Gonzaga University. There, a Vagina Monologues rendition was being rehearsed by various students, including those in the Women’s Studies Club.

That was 21 years ago, and the president of the Jesuit University banned college sponsorship of the “Monologues,” citing Christian values and supposed pushback. One of my cohorts, philosophy professor Mark Alfino, argued against the banishment, telling a standing-room-only crowd of 200 people the ban was a threat to academic freedom.

“It’s a weak faith that doesn’t welcome challenges,” Alfino said. “Academic freedom is not an open-ended license to say anything without impunity. Academic freedom is an openness to the responsible expression of ideas.”

Here’s the deal – some of my students asked me to pen an opinion piece supporting the Vagina Monologues held on campus, as a way to bring in the Gonzaga community and public in by both attending the play but also opening up dialogue around campus rape.

That same semester one of my students (she told me in an office visit) had been the victim of campus rape, unfortunately, the type of violence seen on many campuses: fraternity parties, lots of booze and frequent spiking of women’s drinks with “roofies” (Rohypnol, a clear liquid 10 times stronger than Valium).

I also had a weekly hour-long radio show covering public affairs where I interviewed many heavy hitters in the sciences, publishing, arts, and social justice fields. I didn’t get Eve Ensler on the show, but I had two guests talking about sexual violence and the power of the Monologues, as well as one woman from Somalia who talked about her own forced female genital mutilation.

I discussed both in a written Op-Ed and on my radio show my own issues with the clergy. I had come from El Paso, and there as a reporter, I covered two cases of Catholic priests charged with child rape. These fellows from the Spokane Diocese were accused there, so both were sent south to the border;  back then I didn’t know Spokane from Shinola.

I went on to discuss the Catholic Church’s “penis problem,” getting into some of the history (in the thousands) of priests around the US and Canada and world with multiple accusations each of sexual assault. I brought up the Indian Boarding Schools, too, where sexual assault was occurring.

I took the banishment of the Monologues on campus seriously, and I even questioned the president’s claim that “many boosters and supporters” had spoken to him about their concerns with the play being performed on campus.

Oh the irony: the Gonzaga students put on a wonderful performance, and the public, the GU community, including staff, faculty and some priests, were just a few hundred yards off campus at a hotel ballroom for these young women’s performances which helped as a fund-raiser for the V-Day nonprofit that works to stop rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation and other violence against women.

I am a better person for doing my little part – a published viewpoint and radio rant. Not so ironically, thought, I was told (off the record) by my department chair I would not be hired to teach at GU, per the “upper administration’s orders.”

V-Day for me also means Cancel Culture Day.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Images of unveiled Iranian women and adolescent girls standing atop police cars or flipping off the ayatollah’s picture have become signature demonstrations of dissent in the past few months of protest in Iran.

In fact, among the Iranian protest photos selected for inclusion in Time magazine’s list of the “Top 100 Photos of 2022” are one of women running from military police brigades and another of an unveiled woman standing on a car with hands raised.

As a scholar studying the use of images in political movements, I find Iranian protest photos powerful and engaging because they play on several elements of defiance. They draw on a longer history of Iranian women taking and sharing photos and videos of actions considered illegal, such as singing and dancing to protest gender oppression.

Pictures in past Iranian movements

Iranian women did not stage mass public demonstrations against restrictions on their freedoms for nearly three decades following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when protests against compulsory hijab laws were brutally crushed by the Islamic regime.

In the 2009 Iranian Green Movement against election fraud, however, women played a major role. Images of one young female protester, Neda Agha-Soltan, who was fatally shot by security forces during the protest, went viral, catalyzing millions of Iranians to join the protests.

In subsequent protests, visuals have been at the heart of women’s efforts to mobilize against the Islamic Republic. In 2014, women began recording themselves walking, cycling, dancing and singing in public unveiled, under the banner of the “My Stealthy Freedom” movement. Started by Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-born journalist based in New York, the movement protested the forced wearing of the hijab and other restrictive laws by showing women breaking them.

Walking in busy city streets unveiled, riding a bike in parks where such activities are banned for women and joining dance circles in town squares were among the ways in which Iranian women protested oppressive laws and practices.

See on Instagram

Four years later, what came to be known as the “Girls of Revolution Street,” protests started with one woman, Vida Movahed, standing atop a utility box on Tehran’s Revolution Street to wave her headscarf on a stick like a flag. Soon, others joined Movahed by repeating her action in other public spaces in Iran.

Images showing dozens of people protesting mandatory veiling in this way were widely shared on social media and later picked up by global news networks, bringing international attention to women’s resistance efforts in Iran.

\u201cIt was the quietest protest Iran has ever witnessed. Vida Movahed, a 31-year-old mother of a toddler, stood atop a large utility box and removed the hijab that all women are required to wear by law: https://t.co/O93RGaBDOe\u201d

— The New Yorker (@The New Yorker) 1518348125

The use of images by protesters has been a central practice of resistance in other protests around the world as well. During the Arab Spring, a series of protests against the ruling regimes that spread across the Middle East and North Africa in the early 2010s, images played an important role in mobilizing people into joining the movement.

A photo of a woman dragged by government forces in the streets of Egypt with her body exposed persuaded many to protest against what was a clear example of state violence in the Egyptian uprising. These images challenged the regime interpretations of protesters as “troublemakers” and helped bypass the state-controlled news networks to show the world what was happening on the ground.

\u201cPic #KhaledSaid on the right and other martyrs on the left #Alex #Jan25\u201d

— Mona Eltahawy (@Mona Eltahawy) 1327674773

What such resistance means

Iranian women have been protesting the Islamic Republic’s sexist policies and showing the world what freedom and gender identity mean to them through their bodily expressions.

Images of women freely riding a bike or sitting with a member of the opposite sex while unveiled are ways of protesting through the everyday acts that women are barred from under the Islamic Republic. Through their widespread participation in these actions, women have shown a solidarity.

As it is difficult for the Islamic Republic to suppress this kind of protest, it often responds by arresting key activists who can be identified and imprisoning them for several years. In 2019, one activist associated with this form of protest, Yasaman Aryani, was sentenced to a 16-year jail term after a video surfaced of her handing out flowers in the Tehran metro unveiled.

See on Instagram

Images of Iranian women engaged in defiant acts make their daily oppression visible. Scholar Mona Lilja describes these protests in terms of “resisting bodies” that speak in ways that are not always apparent at the outset of a demonstration or public act of defiance. Emotions, symbolic actions and women’s engagements with the spaces in which they protest combine to form the meaning of resistance we associate with these pictures.

Today’s protest pictures build on past resistance efforts and build on a tradition of resisting the Iranian government.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Parichehr Kazemi.

Armed conflict, climate change, economic stressors, and humanitarian aid shortfalls are among the leading drivers of increased gender-based violence, the head of the United Nations' refugee agency said on Friday, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls.

"There is a shocking, pernicious cycle of hunger and insecurity, each exacerbating the other and fueling risks to women and girls."

"A toxic mix of crises—conflicts, climate, skyrocketing costs, and the ripple effects of the Ukraine war—are inflicting a devastating toll on the forcibly displaced. This is being felt across the world, but women and girls are particularly suffering," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Filippo Grandi said in a statement.

The U.N. agency said that many refugees and internally displaced people can't meet their basic needs due to price inflation and diminished humanitarian aid caused by inadequate funding and supply chain disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and other disruptors like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

"With savings depleted, many are skipping meals, children are being sent to work instead of school and some may have no options but to beg or engage in the sale or exchange of sex to survive," said Grandi. "Too many are facing heightened risks of exploitation, trafficking, child marriage, and intimate partner violence."

As UNHCR details:

Among refugee populations in Algeria, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, South Sudan, Niger, Tanzania, Uganda, Republic of the Congo, and Zambia, UNHCR has recorded serious nutrition concerns. These include acute malnutrition, stunting, and anemia. Across eastern and southern Africa, more than three-quarters of refugees have seen food rations cut and are unable to meet their basic needs. Inside Syria, 1.8 million people in displacement camps are severely food insecure, while nine in 10 Syrian refugees in Lebanon are unable to afford essential food and services. 

Across the Americas, half of those forcibly displaced eat only two meals a day, with three-quarters reducing the quantity or quality of their food, according to UNHCR data. Major deteriorations in food security are projected in Yemen and the Sahel, and millions of internally displaced people in countries like Somalia and Afghanistan live in situations where 90% of the population are not consuming enough food. 

"There is a shocking, pernicious cycle of hunger and insecurity, each exacerbating the other and fueling risks to women and girls, as harmful coping strategies are adopted across communities," the agency said.

UNHCR highlighted the case of one South Sudanese refugee who in 2018 fled to Ethiopia's Gambella region, where she is forced to make dangerous forays for food because of a 50% reduction in monthly aid.

"In the camp, the food is not enough, so the only option for some women is to go to the forest to collect firewood to sell," the woman—who did not give her real name but called herself "Roda"—explained. "As women, we face a lot of risks by going to the forest. You need to walk for at least four hours to arrive at a very distant place where you can gather some sticks to bring home."

One day while going to get wood, Roda was attacked by a man. She was able to escape, but he followed her as she hurried back toward the refugee camp and she remains truamatized by the incident.

"This is not an isolated occurrence," Roda stressed. "Many women have found themselves in these sorts of situations many times. If food was available at home, women would not need all these risks."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Nearly 40 progressive U.S. organizations on Wednesday expressed support for Iranians—especially women and girls—who are defiantly protesting Iran's oppressive theocracy, even at the cost of what rights groups say is hundreds of their lives.

"As U.S. organizations committed to women's rights and justice across the world, we stand in solidarity with the brave people of Iran, overwhelmingly Iranian women and girls, who are demonstrating for their basic rights and strongly condemn the outrageous, widespread, and systematic human rights violations of the Iranian government seeking to silence the Iranian people's demand," the 39 groups, led by the National Iranian American Council, said in a statement.

The signatories continued:

Since the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa (Jhina) Amini at the hands of Iran's so-called morality police, Iranian protesters have bravely demonstrated for an end to the nation's mandatory hijab laws and broader system of repression. Women's rights have been the catalyst of these youth-led protests: giving voice and momentum to deeply held grievances of many Iranians that go to the very core of a system that has failed to serve its people, which is why these protests have cut across Iranian society.

This injustice is compounded by the reaction of the state to protests, which have been met with internet shutdowns and brutal violence from the Iranian security forces, including beatings, mass arrests, and deadly force. More than two hundred have been killed—and that number is likely higher—and thousands have been arrested for voicing their demands and hopes for a brighter future.

"We steadfastly support the Iranian people's demands of 'Women, Life, Freedom,' condemn the decades of oppression at the hands of the Iranian authorities, and call on them to halt their outrageous violence against peaceful protesters, release all prisoners of conscience, and heed the rightful calls of Iranian people for change," the groups' statement affirmed.

Many of the victims of the Iranian crackdown have been members of ethnic minorities, including Baluchis, Kurds, and Azeris.

One Azeri, 16-year-old Asra Panahi, died after security forces stormed Shahed Girls High School in Ardabil on October 13 and brutally attacked students who refused to sing a song praising Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iranian authorities dispute the cause of Panahi's death, claiming she suffered from a congenital heart condition.

In what many Iranians now call "Bloody Friday," regime forces shot dead at least 66 Baluchi people, including children, and wounded hundreds more during an attack on worshippers after Friday prayers in Zahedan on September 30.

Some Kurdish-Iranians have fled the country, risking being shot dead by Iranian security forces along one of the world's most militarized borders in a bid to find refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. Those fleeing include women, some of whom have joined Kurdish armed forces.

One 19-year-old Kurdish-Iranian who made the perilous journey to take up arms in defense of her people described her treatment at the hands of Iranian forces in Sanandaj, a Kurdish-majority city that's seen the biggest protests outside the capital Tehran.

"They pulled my hair. They beat me. They dragged me," the woman, whose real name is not given to protect her safety, told CNN. "At the same time, I could see the same thing happening to many other people, including children."

"I want to fight for the rights of women," she added. "I want to fight for human rights."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The post Black Girls are More Than 4 Times as Likely to Get Suspended Than White Girls, But Hiring More Teachers of Color is Only Part of the Solution appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Andrea Joseph-McCatty.

Part 2 of a two-part series on the one-year anniversary of the Taliban takeover. Read part 1: The world must not wash its hands of Afghanistan’s misery

The advent of Taliban rule in Afghanistan a year ago this month, after two decades under the more liberal, internationally supported Afghan National Government, threw the Afghan populace backward through a time warp.

The return to Taliban oppression has been most traumatic for women and girls, who suddenly find themselves in the equivalent of the Middle Ages again with respect to their rights and prospects.

Today’s Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bans high-school education for girls and restricts females from working, with very limited exceptions. This not only robs girls and women of their futures, but has a much larger impact on Afghan society and the country’s standing in the world.

• READ MORE:  The world must not wash its hands of Afghanistan’s misery
• Other reports on Afghanistan since the Taliban takover

A lot has changed since 2001
Guided by a traditionalist, nativist dogma, the Taliban pursued a similar policy when it previously ruled most of the country from 1996 to 2001. Since then, however, much has changed for Afghan women, especially in the cities.

Nationwide, female literacy doubled — although granted it is still low — and women were eager for education and new opportunities. Some went into politics and public service.

After the 2019 election, 27 percent of Afghan parliamentarians were women, the same percentage as in the current US Congress. Every ministry and government division had at least one woman at a senior decision-making level — I myself was one of them.

More than 300 female judges, 1000 prosecutors and 1500 defence lawyers worked in the government’s judicial system.

Although women were less well represented in business than in government, there were more than 17,000 women-owned businesses in the country. Women were also prominent in other professions including diplomacy, academia and teaching, journalism, and civil society organisations.

Public opinion polls showed that most Afghan men favoured these new roles for women.

Mixed signals
With the Taliban takeover, girls and women suddenly found themselves disempowered, without work and facing severe hardship.

At first, however, there was some hope that the “new” Taliban would act differently from before. Indeed, when we in the Afghan National Government were negotiating with the Taliban pursuant to the 2020 Doha Agreement calling for reconciliation, the Taliban negotiators indicated a willingness to accept a more liberal female role in society.

However, in contrast to the Afghan government’s mixed-gender negotiating team, our counterparts were all male.

Once in power, the Taliban initially sent some mixed signals. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs was closed. By September, schools for boys were reopened, but only elementary schools for girls.

Some women were kept in government offices only to be dismissed when men were trained to replace them.

In December, the Taliban did issue a decree that women could refuse marriage and inherit property, but otherwise nearly all their new measures have been repressive. As a result, the presence of women in Afghan society has been drastically curtailed, and in areas such as political life it is now zero.

The Commission on Human Rights was terminated. A May 7 decree forced women to cover their face in public, with threat of serious penalties.

Another on May 19 banned women from appearing in television plays and movies. Women journalists are required to cover their whole bodies, heads, and faces while reporting.

Deprived of women’s skills
There is no woman in the leadership and administration of the Taliban. None of the female judges, military officers, and women employees in the previous government have been allowed to return to their jobs.

Although a small number of women are allowed to work in the health, education, and journalism sectors, they cannot be effective or free to pursue their ambitions because of the severe restrictions imposed by the Taliban. This also affects aspirations; why should women even seek education if virtually no professional opportunities are available to them?

Although even male members of the mujahedeen have complained about the lack of opportunity for their women, the Taliban so far have privileged the most traditionalist elements of their base—even if they sometimes come up with excuses designed to hold out hope that they will change course later, like blaming the closure of girls’ schools on a supposed lack of female teachers.

The suffering from this is experienced not just at the individual and family level, but also by society as a whole, which is deprived of the skills of half its people.

Ironically, the Taliban also suffers, since it will never be accepted as a legitimate part of the international community if it denies basic rights and opportunities in education, employment, speech, and participation that are almost now universally regarded as fundamental rights of all mankind, including in most of the Islamic world.

It is hard to be optimistic about the future. But at the very least, foreign governments, the United Nations, and civil society organisations should continue to encourage Afghan women in any way possible and deny the Taliban government recognition and support beyond humanitarian assistance so long as it continues its brutal repression of women.

Dr Zakia Adeli was the Deputy Minister of Justice and a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Kabul University before she was forced to leave the country following the Taliban takeover last August.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Transgender Utah girls wishing to compete in high school sports this fall may now do so after a judge on Friday temporarily blocked a state law prohibiting trans student-athletes from joining teams that match their gender identity.

"This is a win not only for my child but for all girls in this state."

Plaintiffs in the case—which involves three trans girls who want to play on girls' scholastic sports teams—and LGBTQ+ advocates welcomed the preliminary injunction issued by 3rd District Judge Keith Kelly, who wrote that the defendants "do not offer persuasive reasons to categorically ban all transgender girls from competing on girls' teams."

"This is a win not only for my child but for all girls in this state," said Jean Noe, a pseudonymous plaintiff in the case. "This law is based on stereotypes and misconceptions that are harmful to all girls."

"I am grateful the court has put this dangerous law on pause and that, at least for the moment, all Utah children can know that they are valued and supported," she added.

The defendants—the Utah High School Activities Association, Granite and Jordan school districts, and their superintendents—had argued that the ban does not discriminate against girls because it targets "biological boys."

However, Kelly, an appointee of former Republican Gov. Gary Herbert, wrote that "the ban singles out transgender girls and categorically bars them from competing on girls' sports teams."

"At the same time, other girls are free to compete," he added. "This is plainly unfavorable treatment."

The court's injunction blocks enforcement of the ban while remaining litigation in the case proceeds through state courts.

Another parent plaintiff in the case, Debbie Roe, said: "My husband and I are very relieved by this decision. We are grateful the court understood how much harm this law has caused, which has been a huge source of stress and trauma for our child."

"Our daughter just wants the same chance as other kids to make friends and play on the team she loves," she added. "Today's ruling gives her the opportunity to do that."

In a written statement to the court, plaintiff Jenny Roe, a 16-year-old who will be a senior in the Granite School District this academic year, said she played volleyball as a junior and would like to do so again, as well as try out for the basketball team.

Roe explained in her statement that she felt isolated at school and did not have much of a social life until she started playing volleyball. 

"Once I joined the team, I had a great group of friends who supported me and who I loved being around," she wrote. "This law scares me. I cannot imagine missing my last volleyball season with my team and I have been really upset just thinking about this."

"If I cannot play with my team," added Roe, "I am worried that I will not even want to go to classes or to school."

The Salt Lake Tribune reports:

Now that the ban is on hold... the state's back-up process for vetting transgender girl athletes will move forward. Under that, a commission will make decisions on which transgender athletes can compete.

The members are set to evaluate a player's wingspan, weight, and height—and whether a player is taking hormone blockers—to determine if a transgender girl, in particular, might have an unfair advantage in a sport by being born male. Some don't see that setup as a better option, suggesting that measuring teenagers' bodies crosses boundaries.

According to the Movement Advancement Project, 18 states including Utah currently ban transgender students from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity.

While Republican-controlled states move to roll back transgender student rights, the Biden administration in June proposed new rules prohibiting educational institutions from discriminating against trans pupils while restoring Title IX protections gutted during the tenure of former President Donald Trump.

The Utah injunction comes two days after local media reported that the parents of cisgender girls who placed second and third to another cis female athlete filed a complaint with the Utah High School Activities Association expressing suspicions that the winner is transgender, a concern the body subsequently—and secretly—investigated by digging through her records going back to kindergarten.

Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox—whose veto of the state Legislature's trans athlete ban was overridden in March—on Thursday responded to the parents' complaint by saying that "making up allegations like that are pretty disturbing to me."

"My goodness," he added, "we're living in this world where we've become sore losers, and we're looking for any reason why our kid lost."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

The post Afghanistan’s Women and Girls Lose Freedom Under Taliban Rule appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chloe Atkinson.

One year ago today, the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, promising to bring stability after two decades of war and U.S. occupation. But the country now faces a grave humanitarian crisis and a severe rollback of women’s rights. We speak with Afghan journalist Zahra Nader, editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a new women-led outlet documenting human rights issues in Afghanistan. “The people of Afghanistan did not make this decision, and they did not choose the Taliban,” says Nader, who explains how imperial occupations of her home country led to the political instability today. Nader also describes the hunger crisis as 95% of Afghans face hunger, and calls for more international attention on Afghanistan.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As next month marks one year since the United States officially withdrew from Afghanistan, we look at the Taliban-ruled country’s devastating economic and humanitarian crisis that has unfolded since. Afghan journalist Bilal Sarwary describes the dire situation as “an epic failure by the Taliban as the de facto rulers in terms of not stopping their crackdown against the Afghan people” while they cope with flash floods, food shortages and more. He adds that the U.S. exit deal with the Taliban “completely sidelined the previous government” and failed to kickstart a peace process, contributing to instability in the country.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Deepa Parent.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Amanda Ferguson.

A copy of a birth certificate issued in June 1940 claims that Mai Kim Quy, a girl, was born at 3 p.m. on Dec. 9, 1939, on Pattle Island to Mai Xuan Tap, a Vietnamese meteorologist and his wife, Nguyen Thi Thang.

The paper was witnessed by Nguyen Tang Chuan, a medical doctor, and Do Duc Mui, head of the local radio communication station.

As such, it indicates that French Indochina, of which Vietnam was part, had administration of the island and Vietnamese people worked there. That could be significant evidence as claimants to disputed features in the South China Sea may seek to show they were the first to have an official presence there.

Pattle is a coral island, part of the Crescent Island group of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. It served as the main base for the colonial-era French Indochinese and later, South Vietnamese occupation of the Paracels.

Vietnam, Taiwan and China all claim sovereignty over the entire Paracel archipelago but China has occupied it since 1974.

Peaceful life

During the 1930s, the French colonial government built some infrastructure including a weather station, a medical facility and a post office on Pattle Island.

Mai Xuan Tap, father of Mai Kim Quy, was among the civilians sent there to man the weather station when it was first set up in 1938. He brought with him his wife and two daughters, Mai Thi Phi, then two years old, and a newly born baby, Mai Thi Phuong.

The eldest daughter, Mai Thi Phi, who is now 86 and lives in Ho Chi Minh City, said: “Our family lived in Pattle four years, from 1938 to 1941. My sister Mai Kim Quy was born there.”

“Unfortunately Quy died in 1942 after we returned to the mainland.”

“Our life on Pattle Island was quiet and peaceful. The Vietnamese living there were mainly civil servants working at the weather station, the post office and the hospital,” Phi recalled.

“We had never seen any Chinese person on the island during the whole time we were there,” she said.

Mai Xuan Tap died in 1983, his wife died much earlier in 1954. After returning to Saigon, the couple had seven more children including three sons and four daughters.

The birth certificate of Mai Kim Quy was passed to the eldest son, Mai Xuan Phu, for safekeeping.

“My family has donated the birth certificate to the Vietnamese foreign ministry,” said Mai Thi Phi.

“The ministry said this is a valuable document that can play an important role in defending the country’s territorial claims in the South China Sea,” she added.

‘Useful evidence’

The Paracel archipelago is now occupied and fully controlled by China, with the biggest feature – Woody Island – being extensively developed. China has also carried out land reclamations and substantial upgrades of its military infrastructure there, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Yet disputes remain over the islands’ ownership.

Contested territorial claims are hard to verify, especially because until the 20^th century, there was no permanent military nor civilian presence of any country there. 

China, Vietnam and Taiwan all have ample historical documents to back up their claims, including maps, declarations and different materials.

Vietnam, which was part of French Indochina, said the troops of Annam (the then-name of colonial Vietnam), and after that, civilian administrators, set up base on the Paracels before anybody else.

Mai Kim Quy’s birth certificate may serve as a historical evidence of physical acts of administration on the Paracel islands, said Bill Hayton, associate fellow in the Asia-Pacific Program at Chatham House, an independent U.K. think tank.

“My argument would be that this [the birth certificate] doesn’t swing the argument decisively but it is very useful evidence that Annam was in effective occupation of some of the Paracels at that time,” Hayton said.

“If the case ever went to a tribunal of some kind, the Chinese would put forward their own evidence and the judges would decide which case was stronger.”

“Such cases aren’t decided by vague claims or printing names on maps but on proving that a state had administrative control over a feature - and registering a birth on the island to a civil servant is quite strong evidence of that,” the British analyst said.

His argument, however, is being rejected by some historians who point out that China’s stance would be to stick to historical claims.

“The French Government stated at the time that they only occupied the Paracels ‘before any other Power did so’, meaning Japan. This was widely reported in the press,” said Mark Hoskin, an independent researcher and lecturer on China’s maritime history and law.

This action was taken because the Japanese had occupied Hainan and implemented a blockade of the Southern Chinese coastline. Japan was threatening France due to the transport of arms via Indochina to China.

“So the French occupation of the Paracel islands had strategic and military reasoning, but was not sovereignty related. The French statements themselves negate any potential for a sovereignty claim,” Hoskin added.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.

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The post #7. Underreporting of Missing and Victimized Black Women and Girls appeared first on Project Censored.

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