UN: human traffickers make $3 bn a year in Europe

The Associated Press: UN: human traffickers make $3 bn a year in Europe

By DANIEL WOOLLS (AP)

MADRID — Traffickers who subject women and children to prostitution and forced labor are engaged in one of Europe's most lucrative crimes — a euro2.5 billion a year, modern-day slave trade whose victims are growing by 50 percent annually, a United Nations agency said Tuesday.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that more than 140,000 people are currently controlled by organized gangs. Many victims are tricked into leaving lives of poverty in eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America with bogus promises of work.
"Europeans believe that slavery was abolished centuries ago. But look around — slaves are in our midst," UNODC executive director Antonio Maria Costa said in a statement accompanying the report. Costa said one big problem is that governments in industrialized countries have only recently passed tougher laws to crack down on trafficking in people.
"It is a very recent recognition of a very old problem," Costa said later to the Associated Press, adding that arrests and convictions of traffickers are rare. "I could count them on one hand." Worldwide, his agency estimated several million people have fallen victim to traffickers.
American actress Mira Sorvino, who serves as a goodwill ambassador for the UN agency, said she met in Madrid with women who have been rescued from trafficking gangs in Spain and their stories were heartbreaking. One Romanian woman was beaten so badly while being smuggled to Spain that her ribs were broken. Despite the injury, she still had to service clients in a roadside brothel while she recovered, Sorvino said.
Another woman, from Nigeria, was fooled into traveling to Spain with a promise of work so she could support her daughter back home. After traveling to Spain in the cargo hold of a ship, and seeing several travel mates die along the way, the woman learned there was no work waiting for her. She ended up as a prostitute and was told she had a euro50,000 debt to pay off.

A legal defeat for the Creationists | NCSE

A legal defeat for the ICR | NCSE - National Centre for Science Education:

The Institute for Creation Research suffered a significant legal defeat in its lawsuit over the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board's 2008 decision to deny the ICR's request for a state certificate of authority to offer a master's degree in science education from its graduate school. A June 18, 2010, ruling in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas found (PDF, p. 38) that "ICRGS [the Institute for Creation Research Graduate School] has not put forth evidence sufficient to raise a genuine issue of material fact with respect to any claim it brings. Thus, Defendants are entitled to summary judgment on the totality of ICRGS's claims against them in this lawsuit."

As NCSE's Glenn Branch explained in Reports of the NCSE, "When the Institute for Creation Research moved its headquarters from Santee, California, to Dallas, Texas, in June 2007, it expected to be able to continue offering a master's degree in science education from its graduate school. ... But the state's scientific and educational leaders voiced their opposition, and at its April 24, 2008, meeting, the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board unanimously voted to deny the ICR's request for a state certificate of authority to offer the degree." Subsequently, the ICR appealed the decision, while also taking its case to the court of public opinion with a series of press releases and advertisements in Texas newspapers.

BHA - new website for World Humanist Day: Humanist Heritage

BHA celebrates Humanist Heritage

Monday, 21, Jun 2010 08:41

Today is World Humanist Day and the British Humanist Association (BHA) has launched its second annual Humanist Week, which aims to increase understanding of, and knowledge about, Humanism. The theme for 2010 is 'Humanist Heritage', celebrating humanist contributions to British society, across the centuries.

www.humanistheritage.org.uk, a new resource that allows people to upload information about their local area and how it relates to Humanism and celebrate great artistic, scientific and social contributions based on a humanist perspective has been launched by the BHA to start off the week.

Italian corruption scandal spreads to Vatican

Italian corruption scandal spreads to touch Vatican - Toronto, ON - Fwix

(I don't know, something about this article just said -- Borgia...Medici...Sforza... :-)

ROME - One of Italy's most prominent Catholic cardinals and a former minister have been put under investigation as a corruption scandal that has tainted the government spread to touch the Vatican. Magistrates told Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe and Pietro Lunardi, former Infrastructure and Transport Minister in the centre-right government, they were being investigated for aggravated corruption, judicial sources said.
The magistrates in the central city of Perugia are investigating a web of corruption and favours involving public works contracts, mostly in construction for major events, such as last year's G8 summit and the Millennium celebrations.
Sepe, 67, is being investigated for alleged corruption when he was a Vatican official running the Congregation for Evangelisation of People, a cash-and-real-estate rich department of the Vatican that finances the work of missions abroad. Sepe, who ran the department until he was moved to Naples in 2006, is suspected of aggravated corruption with Lunardi in connection with a real estate deal.
According to Italian newspapers La Stampa, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, in 2004 Lunardi purchased a building in Rome from Sepe's department at a price well below market value. The next year, when Lunardi was minister, he approved a decree allocating funds for the restoration of historic church buildings, including the 16th century headquarters of the mission department facing Rome's Spanish Steps.
The Perugia investigation has claimed the head of Claudio Scajola, a close ally of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who resigned as industry minister in May. Scajola resigned after it was found some 900,000 euros of cashier cheques used to buy his luxury Rome apartment overlooking the Colosseum came from a constructor arrested in the political corruption probe. He denies any wrongdoing.
The corruption scandal exploded in February when police arrested four people including Angelo Balducci, the former head of the government department that oversees public works and a construction consultant to Sepe's missions department. Balducci and the others were accused of orchestrating a web of corruption and kickbacks among constructors, architects and civil servants who managed tens of millions of euros of public works contracts. Balducci is in jail in Rome. Magistrates have turned down requests for house arrest.
A month after he was arrested, a new scandal involving Balducci and the Vatican erupted when wiretaps implicated him and a member of a Vatican choir in a male prostitution ring. After that scandal, Balducci was dismissed from an elite volunteer corps called "Gentlemen of His Holiness," ushers who serve in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace on major occasions such as when the pope receives heads of state.

Sex education plan in Philippines sparks furious debate

IRIN Asia | PHILIPPINES: Sex education plan sparks furious debate
Similar to the controversy in Ontario, attempts to introduce sex education in schools in the Philippines is running into strong opposition from the Catholic Church - note that the UN is now entering the debate, citing the Convention on Children's Rights (CCR):

MANILA, 18 June 2010 (IRIN) - A controversy is raging in the Philippines over a sex education programme aimed at cutting the population growth rate, which is blamed for massive poverty in the Southeast Asian country of about 92 million. Openly talking about sex remains taboo in many quarters of Philippine society but all that is changing as the government introduces a controversial sex education programme to public school pupils.

The influential Roman Catholic Church is demanding the plan be scrapped, but the cash-strapped government is struggling to contain an annual population growth rate of more than 2 percent. Education Secretary Mona Valisno said she was open to meeting church leaders about the sex education campaign, which was launched this week at the start of the school year. The plan is to introduce the Adolescent Reproductive Health programme to children from the fifth grade and older in 80 public elementary and 79 high schools, but it will soon be expanded nationwide.

'Our role here is to educate the young people on issues that directly affect them and empower them to make informed choices and decisions,' Valisno told reporters, explaining that the sex education modules would be integrated in various subjects, including science and health.

Topics will range from personal hygiene to reproductive health. Issues relating to pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy, as well as HIV and AIDS, will also be discussed, she said. 'Among those who prepared the modules are psychologists because we want to ensure that specific topics for discussions will be made in the appropriate year levels,' she said...

The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), which in the past has succeeded in blocking a proposed law that would have provided public funds for information on and access to artificial birth control, quickly voiced its opposition to the programme, and demanded that it be scrapped on moral grounds. It also argued that sex education was better taught in the privacy of the home, not in the public sphere...

The UN, in a statement on 18 June, meanwhile threw its weight behind the programme, pointing out that the Philippines was a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child that obliges it to ensure adolescent girls and boys are given accurate and appropriate information on how to protect their health and practise sexually safe behaviours.

THE UNPFA said: "Since 47 percent of the population in the Philippines are below 19, a critical element to helping young people out of poverty is providing them with the information to enable them to grow up healthy and enable them to make the right choices for themselves and their families," the UN said.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews rally round parents jailed for defying Israeli court ruling

Ultra-Orthodox Jews rally round parents jailed for defying Israeli court ruling
The parents of 43 ultra-Orthodox girls were tonight on their way to prison for two weeks today after defying a court order over their children's schooling that has highlighted the division between Israel's religious and secular communities.

More than 100,000 ultra-Orthodox men marched through Jerusalem to show their support. "They are going to jail with joy," said Barry Dubin, 28. "We ultra-Orthodox parents will not cave in to the courts." The parents are Ashkenazi, originating from Europe, and are in a long-running battle to have their daughters educated separately from Sephardi girls originating from north Africa and the Middle East.

They reported to a police station this evening, according to a police spokesman. The mothers and fathers were being sent to separate jails to serve their sentences. Jerusalem's centre was gridlocked as a result of the march. Police were standing by in the city's Jewish religious areas last night, the spokesman said. The relative scale of the demonstration, for a city whose Jewish population is half a million, was enormous. Another demonstration in Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, attracted thousands more.

The reason for wanting separate education, the parents claim, is not racism but a desire to remove their daughters from the influence of those they consider less strict in their religious observance. Watching TV at home, having access to the internet, and a laxer dress code among the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox have been cited.

The ultra-Orthodox school in the illegal West Bank settlement of Emmanuel segregated the girls, a move that was subject to a legal challenge resulting in an order to reintegrate. The parents of the 43 girls refused to send them back to mixed classes, leading to sentences for contempt of court.

Underlying the case is the rejection of what the ultra-Orthodox community's sees as state interference in their religious practice and life. "We don't give our girls all the knowledge that there is in the world," said Esther Bark, 50, a mother of seven daughters watching the male-only demonstration today. "We shelter them, and that's why they need a sheltered school. We can't mix a whole assortment of girls in one school."

As police helicopters throbbed over the mass of black-hatted demonstrators, Aaron Shuv, 28, said: "We only follow the rules of God. The Torah [scriptures] is above all government." The issue had nothing to do with discrimination, said Dubin, a father of two. "No court in the world should have the right to tell me how to educate my sons or daughters. The court went against our rabbis."

Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox community has swollen to a third of the Jewish population, assisted by a high birthrate and departure of thousands of secular residents. The secular population is increasingly resentful that its taxes support welfare benefits for the ultra-Orthodox, who reject paid work in favour of religious study. The political leverage of the ultra-Orthodox has also increased since the election resulted in a coalition dependent on the support of small religious parties.

"The ultra-Orthodox community is getting stronger and stronger," said Yitzhak Brudny, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. "The tensions between the religious and secular communities have become especially pronounced. It's both a class war and a cultural war. The ultra-Orthodox are dirt poor. Among secular Israelis and moderate Orthodox Jews, they are seen basically as parasites. And they have no desire to integrate with other communities."

Secular Israelis were enraged by the ultra-Orthodox refusal to abide by the law on the schooling issue. "For many years the culture war has hung over us like a dark cloud, like a threat," Yossi Sarid, a former member of the Knesset, wrote in the Ha'aretz newspaper. "Now it is happening; the war has erupted. The great Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] rebellion has begun and is raging on several fronts … It will destroy basic values, without which a democratic, developed state cannot exist. It will be lost unless it fights back.

Flotilla aid to enter Gaza under UN supervision

UN: Flotilla aid to enter Gaza under UN supervision
GAZA, 17 June 2010 (IRIN) - After intense diplomatic negotiation with Israel, the UN has agreed to oversee the transfer of 70 truck-loads of humanitarian aid that Israel seized from a flotilla of six ships on 31 May.

Thirty loaded trucks have been stuck at the Kerem Shalom crossing into the Gaza Strip, while another 40 truck-loads of aid are being stored in warehouses operated by the Israeli Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA) for the Strip.The trucks contain desperately needed medical supplies, such as hospital beds and wheelchairs, and building materials.

'The UN will take responsibility for the delivery of the aid cargo,' Ahmed Yousef, deputy foreign minister of the Hamas-led government in Gaza, said. He added that some other international aid relief organizations would join the UN in the distribution process.

Personality predicts political preferences, say U of T researcher - University of Toronto -- News@UofT

Personality predicts political preferences, say U of T researcher
There is a strong relationship between a voter's politics and his personality, according to new research from the University of Toronto. Researchers at U of T have shown that the psychological concern for compassion and equality is associated with a liberal mindset, while the concern for order and respect of social norms is associated with a conservative mindset.

'Conservatives tend to be higher in a personality trait called orderliness and lower in openness. This means that they're more concerned about a sense of order and tradition, expressing a deep psychological motive to preserve the current social structure,' said Jacob Hirsh, a post-doctoral psychology student at U of T and lead author of the study.

The study, which appears in this month's Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, may even lend some legitimacy to the term "bleeding-heart liberal. 'Our data shows that liberalism is more often associated with the underlying motives for compassion, empathy and equality,' said Hirsh.

Researchers asked more than 600 participants from Canada and the U.S. to classify their politics as either small-L liberal or small-C conservative instead of identifying with a particular political party. They then administered a personality test to determine the participants' personality traits and their relationship to political preferences.

Hirsh's work contributes to accumulating evidence suggesting political behaviour is motivated by underlying psychological needs. 'We are beginning to understand the deeper motivations that are involved in determining an individual's political leanings,' said Hirsh. 'While everybody has the same basic motivational architecture, the relative strength of the underlying systems varies from one person to the next. If concerns for order and equality are relatively balanced, the individual is likely to be politically moderate; as either motive grows stronger than the other, political preferences move further to either end of the spectrum.'

'People's values are deeply embedded in their biology and genetic heritage,' said Professor Jordan Peterson, co-author of the study. 'This means you have to take a deeper view of political values and morality in terms of where these motives are coming from; political preferences do not emerge from a simple rational consideration of the issues.'

Report of lecture & book by Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, in Owen Sound

About 80 people in Ontario had a remarkable experience on the evening of Saturday June 12, 2010 at The Downtown Bookstore in Owen Sound. Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, Palestinian doctor and author of I Shall Not Hate gave an emotional and at times surprising presentation on his life and views.

Dr. Abuelaish, a resident of Gaza, lost his wife to cancer in 2008. Less than 6 months later, two Israeli rockets exploded on his roof, killing three of his daughters, and a niece. It would be easy to accept that this man would harbour hateful thoughts toward Israel, the country that controls much of what happens in his home community.

Instead, Dr. Abuelaish promotes the belief that hate is poisonous to the body and ultimately to the search for peace. He believes that Israel and the Palestinians must work together to find a common, peaceful and respectful solution to living in the same country.

One can hate a behaviour or an action, but not an entire people. He is fortunate in that as a doctor working in both Gazan and Israeli hospitals, he is a colleague and friend of many caring and ethical Israelis, and cannot hate them as a people. He understands from first-hand experience that it is the extremists on both sides that exacerbate the anger, revenge, murder and ultimately, war.

Although it’s easy to accuse Dr. Abuelaish of naiveté in the face of a hopeless morass of historical fear and aggression, one cannot help but understand that he is essentially right. Both sides in this crisis must recognize the 'other' as humans worthy of understanding and compassion. Peace will only come when hatred is replaced by willingness to recognize the humanity of all.

If Dr. Abuelaish can recognize this, in light of his own tragedies, we all can. In this way he is a profound inspiration to those of us who wish for peace, not just for a 'win'. ~ Submitted by Terri Hope

Red Cross says Israel's Gaza blockade breaks law

ICRC says Israel's Gaza blockade breaks law
Israel's blockade of Gaza is a clear violation of international humanitarian law, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said.

In a statement, the ICRC describes the situation in Gaza as dire, saying the only sustainable solution is a lifting of the blockade. It says Israel is punishing the whole civilian population of Gaza. It also urges Hamas movement to allow ICRC delegates to visit a detained Israel soldier Gilad Shalit.

The ICRC, a traditionally neutral organisation, paints a bleak picture of conditions in Gaza: hospitals short of equipment, power cuts lasting hours each day, drinking water unfit for consumption.

"The whole of Gaza's civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility. The closure therefore constitutes a collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel's obligations under international humanitarian law," the agency said in the statement. And the ICRC blames differences between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority for some of Gaza's shortages.

But the key message from the body which rarely publicly criticises governments is that Israel's blockade of Gaza must be lifted. That message is yet another indication of growing international concern over conditions in Gaza - just last week US President Barack Obama called the situation there unsustainable.

Canada investigating US officials over torture

Canada investigating US officials over torture
Canada's Mounties have been quietly running an investigation into US and Syrian officials linked to the arrest and deportation of a Canadian citizen who was tortured in a Syrian prison, and could lay criminal charges in the matter, sources report.

The news comes the same day that the US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal brought by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian engineer who was detained at New York's JFK Airport in 2002 on suspicion of terrorist links and flown to Syria, where he was tortured for the better part of a year.

A long and expensive inquiry into the matter held by the Canadian government exonerated Arar, finding that Canadian officials had given US authorities incorrect information linking Arar to terrorism. In 2007 Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Arar and offered him a $10.5 million settlement.

Now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has set its sights on the US officials responsible for sending Arar to be tortured in Syria, a country that is not on friendly terms with the US. The investigation is "unprecedented," reports the Toronto Star.

Code-named “Project Prism,” the four-member RCMP probe was first disclosed by the Toronto Star last December. It was thought then to be focused mainly on the actions of Canadian government officials in the Arar rendition saga.

But Arar’s lawyers now say the Mounties are looking foremost to Syria and the United States for the missing pieces to the Arar puzzle, which already was the subject of an exhaustive Canadian inquiry that ended in full exoneration for Arar, including a public apology from Ottawa and $10 million in damages.

'The US should be conducting its own criminal investigation of the officials responsible for sending an innocent man to Syria for a year to be interrogated under torture, not covering for them,' attorney Maria LaHood of the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement.

'Again, the Canadians are doing the right thing by criminally investigating not only Syrian officials, but officials from the US as well. The Obama administration should look to the Canadian example and do what's right - apologize to Maher and hold his torturers accountable.'

Education reduces infant mortality - Indian infants

BBC News - Healthcheck: Indian infants
In rural India a trial has been using women's groups to spread the word about safe childbirth and how to care for newborns

Around 4 million babies worldwide die each year in the first month of their lives. In rural India the Ekjut trial has been using women's groups to spread the word about safe childbirth and how to care for newborns.

The trial set up groups of women who had recently given birth in Jharkand and Orissa. Each group met once a month with a local woman acting as a facilitator. She led discussions on why the group thought the babies were dying. Often the answer was because of evil spirits.

Through the discussions the group began to learn that poor hygiene or nutrition, or lack of access to medical care, are the causes of death. The women then came up with their own ideas of how to improve the outlook for the mothers and babies. These included clean home delivery kits, ways of keeping the newborns warm, and an emergency fund to pay for transport to clinics.

The trial has just reported results in The Lancet. The researchers from University College London and Ekjut, a voluntary organisation in India who collaborated in this trial, reported that by the second year there was a 45% drop in deaths in newborn babies compared with similar areas where there were no groups. And there was a half as much post natal depression in the new mothers in the groups.

UN: Joint Action on Women's and Children's Health

UN: Joint Action on Women's and Children's Health
ASHINGTON, 13 June 2010 (IRIN) - Progress in reducing maternal mortality and morbidity is still "tragically slow". Now, the United Nations has unveiled a global initiative based on government, civil society and private sector cooperation that could save the lives of up to one million women during pregnancy and childbirth.

Progress in reducing maternal mortality and morbidity is still "tragically slow". Now, the United Nations has unveiled a global initiative based on government, civil society and private sector cooperation that could save the lives of up to one million women during pregnancy and childbirth.

A US$20 billion funding gap in maternal and child health in the world's least developed countries means that between 350,000 and 500,000 women die each year from preventable pregnancy-related causes and complications, and another 15 million suffer from equally preventable long-term disabilities.

The new Joint Action Plan for Women's and Children's Health calls on countries to push the health of women and girls to the front of the queue and create an overarching framework for integrated health systems.

A working draft of the plan was presented by Thoraya Obaid, Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), at Women Deliver, a global conference in Washington, US, which brought together 3,500 women health professionals and leaders from 150 countries. Without a dramatic policy shift only 20 out of 68 countries will succeed in meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing maternal mortality by two-thirds, and providing women with equal access to reproductive services by 2015.

"Our intent is to reach out to as many partners and actors as we can so this becomes a bigger effort," said Flavia Bustreo, director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Partnership for Maternal Newborn and Child Health. "Countries will set their own goals ... and then we will capture these commitments and get an accountability framework to reflect them, and measure them over the next five years."

The plan offers overarching formulas, like integrating health services, so a woman would not have to go to separate clinics for information on HIV/AIDS and sexual education - as often happens now – and strengthening health systems to better utilize funds.

However, there were concerns because women's rights as human rights, unsafe abortions, and especially vulnerable women were not included. "Unsafe abortions are the third leading cause of [death in] pregnant women and girls," said Alexandra Garita, programme officer of the International Women's Health Coalition, who noted that women and girls living with HIV and AIDS were also not specifically mentioned.

"When you don't have a mention of human rights you are allowing discriminatory policies to continue," said Serra Sippel, executive director of the Centre for Health and Gender Equality, a Washington-based policy advocacy group.

Bustreo said the draft would go through several phases before passing through the UN General Assembly in mid-September 2010. Mention of human rights was likely to be included in the final document, and appendixes could focus on especially vulnerable female populations.

On the contentious issue of abortion, she noted that the draft did not want to "make a blank check for every country on the issue of unsafe abortions" and "only wanted to make sure abortion would be safe where it is legal - it was important to make that distinction". Abortion is not legal in more than half of the 68 countries that WHO's Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health is monitoring in the countdown to 2015.

Some organizations like Amnesty International have tried to sidestep the issue of unsafe and illegal abortion by focusing on increasing the number of skilled birth attendants. When abortion was brought into the equation, "We get attacked by the Catholic church," Amnesty International's Executive Director, Larry Cox, told IRIN. "The Vatican issues a statement, saying: 'Good Catholics should not belong to Amnesty', and they close down groups in Catholic universities."

Kurtz, CFI and atheist schism

Secularist Schism Widens, Threatening a Movement's Finances -- and Future?
David Gibson

[edited transcript] For decades, and long before the recent arrival of ballyhooed and bully "New Atheists" like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Paul Kurtz and the secular humanist movement that he birthed in the 1970s represented the gravitational center of unbelief in America. Kurtz, a retired University of Buffalo philosophy professor with a scholar's bearing and 50 books to his name, was developing a far-flung network of skeptics, agnostics, secularists and other "non-theists."

He was also building an imposing infrastructure of secular humanism that includes two magazines, a publishing house and affiliated institutions under the aegis of the Center for Inquiry, the internationally renowned hub of humanism, based in Amherst, outside Buffalo. But now Paul Kurtz is gone from the Center for Inquiry (CFI) and its affiliated publications and organizations, resigning last month after losing a lengthy power struggle with CFI's Board of Directors, and the movement he leaves behind isn't looking too good either.

Yet to many the split also underscores a serious and widening schism in the broader community of non-believers, between those who want civil engagement with people of faith, and even cooperation where possible, and atheist "fundamentalists" -- true believers in godlessness who belittle religion and religious people at every turn, and yet by doing so can wind up sounding like the very enemy they are trying to defeat.

"They're dogmatic," Kurtz said of those at CFI who he contends are narrowing the broader scope of secular humanism, which embraces a range of non-religious and irreligious folks. "I don't think the Center for Inquiry, which has among the leading scholars and scientists in the world, that we should resort to that. We should provide important, informative, thoughtful criticism."

Kurtz says he takes no satisfaction in the travails of the organizations he founded, but he also says the problems are not surprising. He says they are a function of what he sees as a shift in tone away from the seriousness of purpose and positive approach that marked CFI's original vision. That shift, he said, coincides with the rise of the so-called New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, who Politics Daily profiled last year, and Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett -- sometimes jokingly referred to as the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse.

"What has happened is that there is increasingly an effort to focus on criticism of religion," Kurtz told me. "Although we are skeptical of religion, we nonetheless have a positive statement to make. We want to work with religious people solving our planetary problems. This represents a basic philosophical difference. I don't believe we should ridicule religion," he said. "To focus on that is degrading."

The fate of CFI remains up in the air, though Lindsay and others seem confident that they can rebound without losing too much in the way of their influence or their endowment.

The wider debate among secularists over whether to engage religious believers, or whether snark and sneer are the best ways to defeat faith and rally unbelievers to atheism, seems destined to continue.

"All through my life I've worked with religious people," Kurtz said, adding with a laugh: "I find my relationship with religious people far more friendly now than with many humanists."

Philipines: Poor women must pay for contraception

PHILIPPINES: Poor women pay for contraception
(IRIN) - Insufficient public funding for family planning services means poor women have to buy contraceptives from pharmacies rather than getting them free from clinics.

"Social disparities and lack of access to services make the poorest of our women suffer," said Alberto Romualdez, vice-president of Forum for Family Planning, a local the NGO. Nearly half the population lives on US$2 a day or less, and spending $1 on a pack of condoms is not an option.

Despite the cost, a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health think-tank, and the Likhaan Center for Women's Health, found that more women - 40 percent in 2008, up from 17 percent in 2003 - were buying contraceptives.

According to the 2008 National Demographic Health Survey (NDHS), women desired a family size of 2.4 children on average, but actually had an average of 3.3 children; only 41 percent of poor women used contraceptives, and had an average of one or two more children than they wanted. The lack of contraception was hampering the already dismal progress in reducing maternal mortality; the government's 2006 Family Planning Survey indicated no significant decline in maternal mortality ratio (MMR) between 1998 and 2006.

The UN Development Programme Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for the Philippines is to reduce maternal deaths to 52.2 per 100,000 live births by 2015. "There is no way that the Philippines will meet their MDG on MMR unless this unmet need for contraception is addressed," said Sharon Camp, president of the Guttmacher Institute.

The Philippines had depended on US Agency for International Development (USAID) for free contraceptives since the 1970s, but as part of the Philippines government's self-reliance initiative from 2002 to 2008, USAID phased out donated contraceptives, including condoms, pills and intrauterine devices. However, the government has not picked up where USAID left off. "The government has been unable to cope with the cutbacks," Junice Melgar, executive director of the Likhaan Center told IRIN.

Reproductive health has been a highly contentious issue in the largely devout Catholic Philippines, where Bishops routinely label modern forms of contraception, like condoms and pills, as immoral.

Environmental: BP to increase pollution in Lake Michingan

BP May Increase Sludge, Ammonia Dumping in Great Lakes by Muskegon Critic

THIS is disturbing ...

BP - undeterred by its Gulf catastrophe from expanding one of their oil refinery plants in Indiana will dump more ammonia and industrial sludge into Lake Michigan. Indiana regulators, back in 2007, exempted BP from state environmental laws so that BP could expand its plant and process heavier Canadian crude oil... BP may be moving forward with that expansion soon.

[2007]Under BP's new state water permit, the refinery -- already one of the largest polluters along the Great Lakes -- can release 54 percent more ammonia and 35 percent more sludge into Lake Michigan each day. Ammonia promotes algae blooms that can kill fish, while sludge is full of concentrated heavy metals.
The company will now be allowed to dump an average of 1,584 pounds of ammonia and 4,925 pounds of sludge into Lake Michigan every day. The additional sludge is the maximum allowed under federal guidelines.

BP is one of the largest polluters of the Great Lakes.

a) BP wants to drill under Lake Michigan, almost a mile below the lake’s bottom. Think of the Gulf leak, but with fresh, not salt water.

b) BP is the 6th largest polluter in the Chicago area. With its new Whiting refinery capacity, its pollution output will increase by 40%.

c) BP deliberately pollutes Lake Michigan with benzene & mercury. Remnants from the tar sands refining process will be far, far worse.

Educating girls lowers maternal death rate

BANGLADESH: Educating girls lowers maternal death rate

WASHINGTON, DC, 11 June 2010 (IRIN) - Despite slow progress in increasing the number of skilled birth attendants, Bangladesh has made enormous reductions in maternal mortality by improving girls' education. The maternal mortality rate (MMR) more than halved in less than a decade, from 724 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1990, to 338 per 100,000 in 2008, according to a recent study published in British medical journal The Lancet. By comparison, the 2008 MMR in India was 254 deaths per 100,000 live births, 47 in Thailand and 7 in Japan.

Improving the education of women has been a key factor in bringing down the MMR. In 2001, the Bangladesh government began offering free education for girls up to 12th grade, with additional incentives like food for education. Girls' enrolment in secondary schools jumped from 1.1 million in 1991 to 3.9 million in 2005, according to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF).
The Bangladesh Demographic Health Survey (BDHS) showed that the percentage of uneducated girls and women from the age of six in rural areas dropped from 50 percent in 1993 to 32 percent in 2007; in urban areas the figure fell from 34 percent in 1993, and to 23 percent in 2007.

Increased access to education has had huge ramifications in socioeconomic development and maternal mortality. "Girls are going to school, getting a better education, getting jobs and, as a result, delaying marriages - it's as simple as that," said Ishtiaq Mannan, of Save the Children.

Women who are better informed are also more active in making family planning choices. The government health survey indicated that married women using contraception - modern methods like the pill or condoms, or traditional methods like periodic abstinence - rose dramatically, from 8 percent in the 1970s to 45 percent in 1993, and reached 56 percent in 2007.

Married women are also having fewer children: a woman had an average of 6.3 children in the 1970s, 3.4 in the early 1990s, and 2.4 in the survey period between 2004 and 2006.

Although women traditionally give birth at home because they are not comfortable with male health workers, more women are aware of the risks of home delivery and are having their babies in health facilities According to the UN Children's Fund, the primary challenge for the Bangladesh health care system is the shortage of women doctors. In 2007, 15 percent of births took place in a health facility, up from 4 percent in the early 1990s. Still, the government survey noted that 85 percent of babies were delivered at home.

"You cannot change something that is culturally ingrained like this, overnight, but only through education can you address this," said Mohammad Abdul Quaiyum, an associate scientist at ICDDR.

Juan Cole: Women, veiling, breast-milk, gender segregation - modernisation?

Juancole.com
Two Saudi clerics have followed an Egyptian one in advocating breast-milk feeding as a way of establishing kinship between men and women, which would then allow the two to be in each others’ presence when the woman is alone and unveiled.

Sheikh Al Obeikan, an adviser to the royal court and consultant to the Ministry of Justice, set off a firestorm of controversy recently when he said on TV that women who come into regular contact with men who aren't related to them ought to give them their breast milk so they will be considered relatives.

A fatwa issued recently about adult breast-feeding to establish "maternal relations" and preclude the possibility of sexual contact has resulted in a week's worth of newspaper headlines in Saudi Arabia. Some have found the debate so bizarre that they're calling for stricter regulations about how and when fatwas should be issued....Under Islamic law, women are encouraged to breast-feed their children until the age of 2. It is not uncommon for sisters, for example, to breast-feed their nephews so they and their daughters will not have to cover their faces in front of them later in life. The custom is called being a "breast milk sibling."

But under Islamic law, breast milk siblings have to be breastfed before the age of 2 in five "fulfilling" sessions. Islam prohibits sexual relations between a man and any woman who breastfed him in infancy. They are then allowed to be alone together when the man is an adult because he is not considered a potential mate.

The things driving this legal advice or fatwa are first of all that Saudis mostly practice the Wahhabi form of Islam and people in the Arabian Peninsula generally tend to be more strict about the notion of gender segregation. Segregating women from unrelated males and having them veil when they go out of the house is not in the Qur’an and historians think they are customs adopted into early Islam by the Arab aristocracy from the Byzantines and ancient Iranians. The Qur’an just says a woman should cover her charms (zinah), and I suspect women in ancient pagan Arabia, where it is very hot, went about as those in some parts of subsaharan Africa still do, with very little clothing on, and the Qur’an just wanted them to cover up a bit. There is no mention in it of a face veil or even headscarf per se. And the only mention of anything like seclusion concerns the Prophet’s wives, and cannot be taken to refer to all Muslim women (in fact early Muslims would have probably thought it blasphemous to put ordinary women in that legal category).

Most Muslim women in history never veiled or were secluded. Pastoral nomads were a significant proportion of most Middle Eastern societies, and their women rode camels and horses outside during migrations to where the pasturage popped up. And peasant women worked the fields and could not be secluded or mostly afford to veil. Only in the past two centuries has veiling and sometimes seclusion been adopted in some Muslim countries as a sign of upward mobility (since these were aristocratic customs...).

Since the Saudi religious authorities are so worried about secluding women, they are inevitably also worried about the ways in which contemporary societies and economies increasingly make such practices (which were only practical in the past for the very rich anyway) impossible.

Thus the appeal to 'milk kinship.' Now, milk kinship is in fact a social institution in premodern Muslim societies, but it was not typically appealed to with regard to loosening gender segregation (which anyway was not so common in the medieval period). Where upper-class families had a nanny she might breastfeed the aristocratic baby at the same time that she breastfed her own infant, and that practice was considered to make the children a kind of sibling. Then the aristocratic could never take the daughter of his nanny to wife, and he might give special promotions or patronage to his ‘milk brother,’ the nanny’s son. These customs existed everywhere from Iran to Senegal, though they affected a small sliver of Muslim society.

I don’t always recommend a wiki article, but this one , which compares milk kinship in Islam to god-parenting in Christianity, is pretty good if not well sourced.

If you weren’t religious or weren’t Wahhabi, you could just suggest that strictures on women and men mixing socially are hidebound and more customary than Islamic, and just change the practice. Hundreds of millions of modern Muslims practice gender mixing (Saudi Arabia, which Westerners often misunderstand as having a normative Islam, is viewed by most Muslims as an outlier). In fact, the spread of the headscarf in places like Egypt is probably not a sign so much of increased female conservatism but an attempt to make it all right for women to enter the public sphere in much greater numbers (also women wearing headscarfs are a little bit less likely to be pinched and harassed by men in public). But such an argument would not work in Saudi Arabia, where the authorities are zealous about Wahhabi tradition.

Gender segregation is not only a practice of conservative Muslims. It is also in more rigid strains of Orthodox Judaism in the US and Israel; in the US, Orthodox schoolboys objected to having a woman bus driver, and in Israel Orthodox women are expected to sit at the back of the bus (one refused and was beaten).

Actually, gender segregation is quite common in Asia and I can remember it being difficult for a woman in India who had been elected to the board of a village NGO to meet with her male colleagues.

So the Saudi clerics are tinkering with the tradition, since in the past it concerned a wetnurse and children under 5, not adult women and adult men. And when that change is made, it becomes weird. But it isn’t a sign of conservatism (it departs from the traditional custom into new territory). It is a sign of modernism. It is an attempt to create a wider circle of men with whom women can legitimately interact in public.

AFGHANISTAN: Maternal health needs more than healthcare

AFGHANISTAN: Maternal health needs more than healthcare
KABUL, 9 June 2010 (IRIN) - Nowhere in the world are as many mothers dying from pregnancy and birth-related complications as in Badakhshan Province, northeastern Afghanistan, where maternal mortality figures are estimated at 6,000 per 100,000 live births, say agencies. Yet, the relatively peaceful province has more maternal healthcare facilities than Helmand, Zabul, Uruzgan and several others.

For its 351,000 female population, Badakhshan has 106 midwives, 10 female obstetric experts and 73 health centres. There are also 12 mobile health clinics offering maternal health services in remote villages, according to local officials. By comparison, in Helmand Province, southern Afghanistan, where access to health services has been limited due to insecurity, only 29 midwives, three female doctors and about 40 health centres deliver obstetric services to more than 450,000 women. One reason for Badakhshan’s high maternal mortality rate is the lack of roads and rugged terrain, which hinder access to health facilities.

Eric Laroche, assistant director-general for health action in crises at the UN World Health Organization (WHO), told IRIN. 'The health sector in general is being funded less and less, and within that activities for maternal health are funded even less again.'
Access is particularly difficult in winter, when floods and avalanches prevent people from travelling to clinics even by donkey or horse.

'Maternal mortality is our national problem. It’s not just a health problem and it cannot be tackled only through health intervention,' said Saadia Fayeq Ayubi, director of reproductive health at the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH). We need to build roads and eliminate illiteracy, poverty, gender violence and prevent child marriage and also raise public awareness about the risks of multiple and short-term pregnancies.

UN -IRIN Global | Gaza aid waiting at border crossing

UN NEWs: Gaza aid waiting at border crossing
TEL AVIV, 9 June 2010 (IRIN) - Forty-eight trucks with humanitarian aid seized from the aid flotilla bound for Gaza on 1 June are stuck at the Kerem Shalom crossing and in Israeli Defense ministry warehouses.

A week after the supplies, including medical aid, wheelchairs, toys and cement seized from the aid flotilla on 1 June were unloaded, Hamas, which is running the Gaza Strip, will not allow the materials to enter, according to Israeli media reports. Hamas continues to insist the shipment should not be brought in through the land crossings, the Israeli Ynetnews.com website stated on 7 June. Major Guy Inbar, spokesman for the Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories, told IRIN that COGAT would keep trying to coordinate the transfer with the Palestinian authority and international organizations, including of cement, which Israel rarely allows into Gaza, for 'specific humanitarian projects'.

Bush Administration Engaged in Illegal Human Experimentation on Torture

Physicians for Human Rights Report
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) released today the results of a landmark investigation that, according to the organization’s press release, “uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody.” PHR is asking President Obama to “order the attorney general to undertake an immediate criminal investigation of alleged illegal human experimentation and research on detainees conducted by the CIA and other government agencies following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.” They are also seeking other investigations by Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Justice.
As PHR’s White Paper — “Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program” (PDF) — makes clear, illegal experimentation upon human subjects was an integral part of the Bush/Cheney/CIA “enhanced interrogation” program (EIP) from the very beginning. Medical and psychologist monitors were used to collect and analyze data from the EIP interrogations in order “to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations.” The use of illegal experimentation both reveals the actual parameters of the torture program, and raises the stakes surrounding the need for accountability for these actions to a new level.
According to PHR’s White Paper:

Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The charges are expected to resonate throughout the legal, human rights and religious communities. The executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), Rev Richard Killmer, commenting in a press release on PHR’s report, said he deplored the “deeply disturbing evidence that our government committed, in our names, forced human experimentation that recalls some of humanity’s darkest days — charges from which no person of faith can afford to turn away.” (NRCAT has also released a new video today, “Accounting for Torture.”)

INDONESIA: Aceh laws discriminate against women

IRIN Asia (note the importance of Ngos and women's groups as a counterbalance to fundamentalist legal initiatives)

BANDA ACEH, 7 June 2010 Earlier this year, Sharia police arrested a 20-year-old college student and her boyfriend for indecency; they had been spending time together even though they were not legally married. Her boyfriend was released, but she was detained and then allegedly raped by three policemen. Two of the men are on trial, while the third is at large. That incident and others, such as the ban on tight trousers, have sparked outrage among rights activists, who say the laws disproportionately target women.

"This really poses a big challenge… there are policies that discriminate against and violate women," Iriantoni Almura, programme officer for the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in Aceh, told IRIN.

Home to more than 240 million people and the world’s largest Muslim population, Indonesia practises an Islam that is relatively modern and moderate. But Aceh, which suffered decades of war and was devastated by the 2004 tsunami, prides itself as the place where Islam first gained a foothold in Southeast Asia and is far more conservative. Unlike other parts of Indonesia where women go without headscarves and wear skirts and short-sleeved shirts, in Aceh, nearly all women cover their heads and wear long sleeves and trousers so little skin is showing. The government recently prohibited shops from selling tight dresses and began distributing long skirts to women wearing tight trousers or denim jeans.

Islamic courts in Aceh had long handled marriage, divorce and inheritance cases, but since gaining special autonomous status in 2001, the coverage of its Islamic courts has now been extended to criminal cases as well. In September 2009, provincial lawmakers passed a provision that would allow adulterers to be stoned to death. "It was met with horror by a lot of the women’s rights groups", said Sidney Jones, senior adviser with the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Jakarta. Under pressure from civil society groups and human rights NGOs, the law has not yet been passed.

According to the ICG, “the most problematic institution set up under Islamic law has been the vice and virtue patrol tasked with monitoring compliance with Sharia”. Its members are highly unpopular and poorly recruited and trained, the report states.

Three laws – banning alcohol, gambling and illicit relations between men and women – are punished by caning and fines, but have been loosely interpreted, resulting in randomly cited violations and vigilante justice. "There is a provision in the [law] that says that, as good Muslims, it is our duty to uphold its implementation, but this is misunderstood by many to think that they have the power to mete out their own punishments" said Suraiya Kamaruzaman, founder of one of the province’s first women’s rights groups, Flower Aceh.

Al-Ahram Weekly: From clashing civilisations to universal humanism

Fascinating article on the Kantian vs the "Clash of Civilisations" -worth reading the whole thing

From clashing civilisations to universal humanism

To solve the region's intractable problems, Obama should turn the shared history between Arabs and Europeans for guidance and wisdom, writes Salah Salem

The relationship between the Arab-Islamic world and the Euro-American West is caught between two antithetical perspectives. The first is to regard the two worlds as sibling civilisations, based, to varying degrees, upon monotheistic legacy and Abrahamic prophetic tradition fused with elements of Hellenistic philosophy and sciences as well as elements of the ancient philosophical legacy of the Far East. Proponents of this perspective take inspiration from the lesson of history that true religions do not clash but rather complement one another and that vital civilisations do not clash but rather compete with one another. Instead, it is the priests of religion and custodians of society who stir tensions and provoke conflict, exploiting baser human instincts such as fear or greed in the interests of conquest or revenge. This is not religion speaking, but the political state; it is not civilisation at work, but the forces of destruction.

...Moreover, as the Arab East embarked on its modern renaissance it mirrored the West's recognition of Arab Muslim philosophers and scientists in the Middle Ages and summoned the aid of pioneers in modern rationalism and humanitarianism, from Descartes to Habermas. Along the way, of course, it would have encountered the great Immanuel Kant who formulated the most promising rule for human coexistence. Kant had a vision of history as a civilisational structure driven toward advancement and progress. In his proposed programme for "Perpetual Peace" he stated that for human political society to attain such advancement it had to implement two systems of law simultaneously: one governing the internal affairs of nations on the basis of freedom and aspiring to democracy, and the other governing the relations between nations on the basis of justice and aspiring to world peace. He stressed that there could be no true freedom within nations until justice and peace was realised between nations...
The antithetical perspective sees the two worlds in a state of perpetual conflict, taking turns at exercising hegemony over the world over most of the course of history, starting from the Axial Age through the classical and medieval eras to the expansion of the modern global order. The civilisations that rose to global prominence on one side of the divide were the Pharaonic, Babylonian, Carthaginian and Persian civilisations, followed by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, and then by the Mongolian and Ottoman Empires. On the other side of the divide they were the Minoan, Athenian, Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine and Holy Roman empires, through to modern European empires. The tug-of-war between the two sides is exemplified by the Arab domination of southwest Europe in the early medieval period and the subsequent Ottoman expansion into Eastern Europe, on the one hand, and by the Crusader kingdoms in the Levant in the middle ages, and subsequent European colonial conquests of most of the Islamic world....

Not only does the new liberalism of the US administration permit it, Europe, itself, is capable of asserting a unified will, now that it has emerged from the bitter rivalries that characterised its history before the two world wars and during the Cold War. It could also be a healthy partnership, with the US's greater economic and military strength tempered and refined by Europe's greater wisdom derived from its deeper cultural vision and sense of history, as the heir to and first hand participant in the Renaissance, the Reformation, the age of enlightenment and the age of industrialisation and modernism.
Having lived through all these ages, engaging in the processes of war-making and peacemaking, and questioning others and introspection, Europe has a more subtle appreciation of all the complexities and passions of history, and thus is better poised to offer the US a clearer insight into the intricacies of the Arab region, especially given its geographic proximity to this region and the extensive history of interaction, in war and in peace, with it. Europe's consequent greater ability to understand and sympathise with Arab demands, which essentially involve the promotion of a mutually respectful relationship with the West and a just settlement with Israel, will help the US and the international community reach these ends. In the process, it will enable the humanitarian current in Arab culture to prevail, help rout the forces of extremism, and pave the way for the victory of the enlightened rational mind over the darker instincts of fear and terror.

YEMEN: Paying girls is paying off for school attendance

IRIN
SANAA, 6 June 2010 (IRIN) - A two-year-old government scheme offering financial incentives to parents in the rural areas of two of the country’s poorest governorates to send their daughters to school or to prevent them from dropping out is paying off as girls' enrollment rates have increased by around 9 percent in the targeted schools, according to education officials.

As part of the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) scheme, education departments in the southern governorate of Lahj and the western governorate of Hodeida are giving girls an annual stipend of YR 8,000 (US$35) in two installments, according to deputy education minister Lutfiya Hamza. To get this money, the girl must attend at least 80 percent of classes each semester.

The scheme is part of the education ministry's Basic Education Development Project (BEDP), supported by the World Bank, the UK Department for International Development and the Netherlands government. The objective of BEDP is to assist Yemen in expanding the provision of quality basic education for all with particular attention on gender equity.

According to a 2007 UN Development Programme report, 43 percent of girls and 67 percent of boys were enrolled in primary, secondary and tertiary education in the country. In addition, only 35 percent of girls were literate, compared with 73 percent of boys. The Yemeni government's education strategy aims to have 90 percent of all girls in school by the end of this year and 95 percent by 2015. It also aims to reduce the gap of boys' and girls' enrollment to 11 percent. The incentive scheme seeks to reduce poverty and population growth rates by ensuring girls are educated.

'In Yemen, poverty is associated with the rapid population growth,' Ahmad al-Arashi, head of BEDP, said. 'When girls attain higher levels of education, they will be aware of family planning and birth spacing, which are the key to alleviating poverty.'

He said many social problems, including early marriage and child malnourishment, are symptomatic of the high female illiteracy rate in Yemen. 'By having access to education and completing their education, girls will refuse to marry at an early age..Also, their parents will not force their daughters to marry at a younger age when they see them going to school with the support from CCT."

However, convincing parents of the benefits of sending their daughters to school is an uphill struggle. Many families, particularly in rural areas, say it is a waste of money..."After grade five or six, girls stay home to cook and fetch water and firewood until they get married." Because jobs are limited for women in Yemen, poor families often feel it is better to educate their sons as they will have more opportunities, she said.

'Poverty is the main obstacle hindering education in general and girls’ education in particular,”' Salah Salim, a local councilor in the governorate, said. "'In many rural areas, a seven-member family lives on less than YR1,000 [US$4.5] a day, and therefore resorts to keeping their daughters out of school'.

OpEdNews - Article: Nothing to Kill or Die For - AHA convention

OpEdNews - Article: Nothing to Kill or Die For

David Swanson: "On Saturday, June 5, I took part in an event organized by Jeff Nall of Humanists for Peace, together with Nall, Armineh Noravian, and Debra Sweet. Nall had organized a panel at the national conference of the American Humanist Association to talk about the need to work for peace. And the room was packed.
The audio of all four of us speaking and then taking questions is here.

Jeff opens it up with a fiery speech that you really should listen to, but the first half of his first sentence is missing from the recording. It was: "What do Alice Walker, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, and Corliss Lamont have in common?" The point of the question and of Nall's following remarks is that as long as there has been something called humanism it has striven for peace. The various humanist "manifestos" support peace activism. The AHA has itself passed resolutions against wars in decades past. Jeff appeals to humanists to place ending war as high in their list of priorities as the separation of church and state.

Armineh spoke next, beautifully and powerfully about war and the Middle East. I went third, and Debra last. I hope to post the other speakers' written remarks soon, but in the meantime here are mine: 

If there were no religion, would there be no wars? It's not a simple question to answer. Certainly without religion, strictly understood as Christianity, Islam, and so forth, many wars would need new justifications and might end. But without habits of thought closely tied up with religion and heavily promoted by religion, no new justifications for war could be found. Without deference to authority, without blind obedience, without fear-based actions and willful self-delusion, without the notion that what's so outrageously called "this" life (as if there were another) can be devalued, without the concepts of unredeemable evil and infallible goodness, without the ultimate self-contempt and despair against which humanism stands, war could not continue.

Of course, ending religion or the undesirable habits of thought that come with it is not a small task, and we must pursue both the end of religion and the curtailing of such thinking habits separately and simultaneously. And we must, without delay, offer whatever understanding we have to those who are struggling to end war and those who should be. It is not enough to sit back and remark that if everyone were an atheist there would be no wars.

And it isn't even true. Wars would be driven by power lust, greed, sadism, overcrowding, and resource depletion, and sold as heroic self-defense regardless of religion. Americans fly half way around the world to attack and occupy powerless nations, antagonizing great masses of people and endangering our own country, all in self-defense. That can only be ended through clarity of thought accompanied by action and sacrifice.

While I think humanists are intellectually well placed to show others how war myths are debunked, I see Catholics disproportionately represented among those making the greatest sacrifices for peace. Where are the humanists? What is it they value more than human life that keeps them otherwise occupied? I certainly hope it's not proselytization of theists, because -- while that is needed -- I think actions speak more loudly than words (as exemplified by the work in Haiti we just heard about in the other room). I think that offering theists the alternative of peace, justice, brotherhood, sisterhood, sustainability, and prosperity is a more appealing trade than just offering them the absence of their theism. 

... But where are the coalitions of deniers of the lies of both war makers and god makers? Where are the organizations that would allow me to advance the immediate political goals I find most needed and the long-term cultural goals that I think will help most?


... I think humanists can offer lessons in resisting the manufacture of consent. We're used to refusing popular myths. If we're told the goal is "victory" we ask what that would look like. We don't buy into the practice of asking why someone had to die in a war, as if the inscrutable answer, which is beyond our so-called human understanding, would show their death to be a good thing. Unless they died defending people, they died attacking people for the profits of others. Which is not to say that one should not die for an idea, but rather that one should not kill for an idea, and should not do anything for an idea one does not understand and has not thought through.

Those activists who died on a ship bound for Gaza opened the Egyptian border and may have begun the end of the siege. They did not die in vain. And when we read in the paper that providing aid to Gaza is a threat to Israel, we humanists should be able to explain to others that when aid to your victims has become a danger you can claim to fear, something has gone terribly wrong....

I think humanists can help others see beyond all forms of sectarian prejudice -- religious, racial, cultural -- in order to experience the common humanity of all of us without expecting others to resemble us too closely.

...through dialogue and the arts, humanists should be able to instill in others a sense of the value of life -- or what some religious people call "this" life. And that includes reversing the current levels of horror we feel in response to torture and bombing. We are more outraged by the torture of a human being than by the murder of many human beings from a safe distance in the air, or from a drone control screen in Las Vegas. A better understanding would reverse this, and would also inform us of the nuclear danger we are in of ending all known life on the planet.


...humanists could lead the way in offering a vision of what we could replace war with, including radically more of the wonderful aid to Haiti we just heard about, including friendly relations abroad, and -- for the same financial cost as the wars -- such wonders as a healthy and sustainable economy, green energy, free and top-quality education from preschool to college, healthcare, retirement security, paid vacations and parental leave. Other nations less religious and more peaceful than our own have these things already or are much closer to them...
....humanists could provide a cross-platform core of activists helping to form the sort of coalition that is needed. Right now we have labor and teachers and disaster relief advocates backing the same bill in Congress that peace groups are opposing. A more strategic coalition would demand clean votes free of war funding before supporting the passage of funding for jobs or schools -- even if only because there would then be much more money for jobs or schools."

David Swanson is the author of "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press and of the introduction to "The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush" published by Feral House and available at Amazon.com. Swanson holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia.

Gays in the U.N.? We'll get back to you.

International Gay Rights NGO blocked from UN-ECOSOC status
Egypt led a coalition of conservative countries on Thursday in blocking a well-known New York-based gay rights organization from gaining accreditation as a full-fledged advocacy group by the United Nations, prompting complaints of discrimination by the United States and Britain.

The action came in a meeting at U.N. headquarters of an obscure NGO committee that approves the accreditation of thousands of private lobbyists and advocacy groups that want to work at the United Nations. Since 2007, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission has sought U.N. "consultative status," which would allow it to obtain a grounds pass and participate more formally in U.N. meetings on human rights, health, and other issues. But each year, a coalition of conservative countries led by Egypt, Pakistan, and Qatar have delayed action on the group's application, posing dozens of detailed questions they claim have never been adequately answered.

"It's very clear that the vote to block our application from action in the NGO committee is a clear case of discrimination," said Sara Perle, a spokeswoman for the group. "We're not the first NGO to face this kind of discrimination in this committee and I'm sure we won't be the last...

"This NGO is committed to combating discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity," said Kelly Razzouk, the U.S. representative at the meeting. "It has contributed to valuable research on HIV/AIDS and its work is well known to this committee." The U.S. representative said the group has "answered over 44 written questions, giving delegations more than enough time to ask questions and have those questions answered."

But Egypt's representative, Wael Attiya, said his government was still not satisfied with the U.S. group's answers to a series of questions on how it defines sexual rights. "We have reviewed the answers and thanks. We believe the questions were not answered in a straight way." Attiya also expressed concern about whether the group might promote a worldview that could subject religious leaders to persecution. If a "preacher says that a relationship between a same-sex [couple] is wrong, will the preacher be hunted?" he asked, according to official notes taken at the meeting by a delegation.

Angola, Burundi, China, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, and Sudan backed the Egyptians. Turkey abstained. The United States intends to protest the Egyptian action when the matter is brought before the larger 54-member Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which oversees the work of the NGO committee. ECOSOC generally rubber-stamps the committee's decisions. But that action can be overturned if a country forces another vote in ECOSOC.

Climate sceptics and fringe political groups are an unhealthy cocktail

Climate sceptics and fringe political groups are an unhealthy cocktail by Leo Hickman,guardian.co.uk
Great article on the convergence of climate sceptics, anti-gay campaigners, tea-party backers, (and astronauts!) "On 11 June, in Orlando, Florida, an organisation called Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP) meets for its AGM at the Sheraton Safari Hotel & Suites" They will be discussing climate change as a hoax, (Osteoporosis of the Sea: the Failed Global Warming Scare,Games Environmentalists Play: Coercive Utopians' Attack on Energy)etc. The poor science and unsubstantiated arguments of this rag-tag group also attack Humanism, of course:

"...Humanists manipulate, systematize, and orchestrate the instruction in school and the affairs of public life so as to "liberate" people from the stifling suppression of mother nature by "religion" --- i.e., inborn human instincts and passions. Humanists employ the slight of hand linguist trick of substituting the religion of evolutionary humanism for the creation religion of Jehovah by tagging the latter "religion, forbidden by the First Amendment" and the former "scientific fact." Both labels, like humanism itself, are conspiratorial fabrications". Be warned, it's a befuddled rant)

Note the word 'conspiracy'. It seems what they have in common is uniformed paranoia, and some sort of massive resentment. Responding to this group with facts doesn't work - but it's good to know that the outside world is watching.

The Human Side of Doctor-Patient Relations- the Humanist Centre

Doctor and Patient - The Human Side of Doctor-Patient Relations - NYTimes.com
When D., a woman in her mid-30s, learned that she was dying from complications of AIDS, she fully expected that her life would end in much the same way it had been lived: homeless, alone and among strangers. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Jason K. Alexander, a medical student at the time, she might have been right. D. was one of the program’s first patients, a woman who years earlier had been rejected by her own family. "She was angry at first, Dr. Alexander said, recounting his initial visit with her. "She was dying, but she took the opportunity to attack me, a medical student who had walked into her room and said that he was just there for her to talk."

Dr. Alexander was about to leave when he remembered the advice of his faculty adviser: let the patient guide the conversation. "I surrendered to her anger and told her that we didn’t have to talk, that I would just sit in the room with her." After several minutes of trying "to embrace the deafening silence," Dr. Alexander heard a noise coming from where D. was sitting. "I saw tears rolling down her eyes," he said remembering the moment. "She began sobbing that she was scared and had no one."

That visit would be the first of nearly daily conversations between Dr. Alexander and D., meetings that would continue several months until her death.

Two years earlier Dr. Alexander, along with four other classmates, had created a project that paired medical students with patients who were dying alone. "We wanted to reach out to patients who had been shunned, the people others didn’t want to deal with,"

The program, which also helps family members who are struggling with terminally ill loved ones, was part of an innovative new center for humanism at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-New Jersey Medical School in Newark. The center offers four-year scholarships for students with outstanding academic and community service records...

The school’s initiative, started with a $3.2 million grant from the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey, is part of what many believe is an expanding movement in medical education: a growing emphasis on the human side of medical care. Leaders of this 'humanism movement' have come from both the general public and within the ranks of medical education. And although they have focused on issues like patient-centered care, physician professionalism, clinics for the uninsured and disaster relief, nearly all have agreed on one thing: the importance of supporting what they believe are the natural, but often suppressed, ideals and inclinations of those who chose to pursue a career in medicine.

From the Humanist Center Website:

"Physicians must employ humility and compassion to balance the scales between ourselves and our patients. Doctors must also change how they practice. In their many years of medical training, doctors learn how to practice medicine, how to read, interpret and utilize sophisticated studies, how to use diagnostic information and tests, and how to prescribe appropriate treatments. The emphasis has been placed upon science and, more recently, economic and legal matters, medical systems and logistics.

Through this evolution, doctors have moved progressively further away from engaging in behavior that links them humanistically to the spirit of their patients. They have stopped caring for their patients and only focus on treating a disease. This is a critical omission, for our patients' feelings are deep-seated and are fundamentally based beyond the "corps humain."

But technology is not the enemy of humanism. Indeed, thanks to the age of computers and body scans that can measure qualitative and quantitative function, physicians now have more and better information to remove uncertainty about the care they provide to their patients. Therefore patients' concerns and fears may be addressed with the confidence of full disclosure of possibilities that are based more on facts rather than perception.

As such, the current climate of legal, and thus, impersonal, medicine may return to a climate of care that incorporates a moral and ethical responsibility. We will Dr. Wilson ultimately be reminded that the humanistic and compassionate physician will also most likely be the most knowledgeable physician...."

PAKISTAN: City life offers women new perspectives

PAKISTAN: City life offers women new perspectives

AN interesting article on how rural refugees discover another world for women when they move to cities - and some girls don't want to go back.

...According to the Asian Development Bank, literacy levels in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are 5.9 percent against a national level of 40 percent. "For women in tribal areas the literacy rate is really very low, even below 1 percent. They also lack social mobility and awareness," Roohi Bano, Regional Manager for the Peshawar-based Khwendo Kor NGO, which works for the education and development of women. Such efforts will take time to bring results, however. Young women from tribal areas, particularly those who have seen a different kind of life by being displaced, are eager to change their futures.

"I went to Karachi with my parents while my father was searching for work, and I saw so many women head out each day to colleges. These women know how to stand up for themselves and work alongside men," said Shandana Khan, 20. "My mother cannot read and she has suffered years of oppression. She had no choice because she had no income of her own."

But change is opposed by many. "An education for women just gives them the wrong ideas. After all, it is a girl’s fate to be married off and to bear children," said Wazira Bibi, 60, from South Waziristan. "Life in cities has meant our girls now think differently. I hope this will not create problems in the future."

Some Arabs See Wisdom In Burqa Bans

AMMAN, Jordan -- As European country after European country banned Muslims from wearing the burqa, niqab or other Islamic clothing that covers a woman's face completely, several Arab nations stood quietly by.

Few, if any, Arabs support such bans and the prohibitions raise questions among them about anti-Muslim sentiment in the West. However, many people in Jordan can at least understand where European countries are coming from, especially regarding security concerns. In most cases, European politicians in support of banning complete facial covering avoided making religious arguments, instead arguing that clothing of any kind that hid a person's face constituted a security threat.

"It's understandable why some countries are not too happy with the niqab because it does not reveal the true identity of a person, the face of a person. Now whether this should be introduced as a law or not, I'm not sure," said Moneef Zou'bi, director general of the Islamic World Academy of Science in Amman. "I think it's a matter of choice at the end of the day."

In France, the most recent country to ban the niqab and burqa, Jean-François Cope, the majority leader of the French National Assembly, went so far as to compare the niqab to a ski mask in an editorial piece published in The New York Times in which he defended the law. "The visibility of the face in the public sphere has always been a public safety requirement. It was so obvious that until now it did not need to be enshrined in law," he wrote. "But the increase in women wearing the niqab, like that of the ski mask favored by criminals, changes that. We must therefore adjust our law, without waiting for the phenomenon to spread."

Though accepted by most Arabs, the niqab and burqa are still relatively uncommon outside the Arabian Gulf. Most Arab women tend to view such coverings as too extreme or unnecessary.

Gaza Flotilla - MJ Rosenberg from Media Matter & the WHO

Lying About The Gaza Flotilla Disaster | Political Correction
Here's an interesting article by MJ Rosenberg about the propaganda war around Gaza and the Flotilla attack. Of course the media war on both sides is relentless - but Rosenberg clearly talks about the intent of the Flotilla to break the siege of Gaza. At present:

- 95% of Gaza's water fails World Health Organization standards leaving thousands of newborns at risk of poisoning.
- Anemia for children under the age of 5 is estimated at 48%.
- 75 million liters of untreated sewage are pumped into the Mediterranean Sea every day - because piping and spare parts are not permitted

Here is Reuters on the Humanitarian impact of the siege

also:
On 1 June, the World Health Organization (WHO) called for "...unimpeded access into the Gaza Strip of life-saving medical supplies, including equipment and medicines, as well as more effective movement of people in and out of the territory for medical training and the repair of devices needed to deliver appropriate healthcare...It is impossible to maintain a safe and effective healthcare system under the conditions of siege that have been in place now since June 2007," Tony Laurance, head of WHO's office for Gaza and the West Bank, said. "It is not enough to simply ensure supplies like drugs and consumables. Medical equipment and spare parts must be available and be properly maintained.

"It is clearer than ever that Israel's restrictions on access to Gaza must be lifted in line with Security Council Resolution 1860," said Mark Lyall Grant, the British ambassador to the UN"

Church Excommunicates Nun Who Authorized Emergency Abortion to Save Mother's Life

Church Excommunicates Nun
SEE RELATED LETTER TO THE EDITOR on the Ontario Humanist Society website.

Sister Margaret McBride was forced to make a decision between her faith and a woman's life last year, when a 27-year-old mother of four rushed into St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix only 11 weeks pregnant.

"This was not an easy decision for her," says her long-time friend Mary Jo Macdonald. As a key member of the hospital's ethics board, McBride gathered with doctors in November of 2009 to discuss the young woman's fate.

The mother was suffering from pulmonary hypertension, an illness the doctors believed would likely kill her and, as a result, her unborn child, if she did not abort the pregnancy. In the end, McBride chose to save the young woman's life by agreeing to authorize an emergency abortion, a decision that has now forced her out of a job and the Catholic Church.

BBC - Artefacts hint at earliest Neanderthals in Britain

BBC - Artefacts hint at earliest Neanderthals in Britain
Archaeologists have found what they say is the earliest evidence of Neanderthals living in Britain. Two pieces of flint unearthed at motorway works in Dartford, Kent, have now been dated to 110,000 years ago. The finds push back the presence of Neanderthals in Britain by 40,000 years or more, said Dr Francis Wenban-Smith, from Southampton University.
(see also: So we're part Neanderthal. What now?

India: Honour Killings - Caste and land, not religion

See KENYA article below, on Land and Power.

TIME: Activists say dozens of people, both women and men, are killed for "honor" every year, falling victim to the deeply entrenched caste system, which dictates an individual's social standing based on the caste they are born into. The majority of these killings take place in the agrarian states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, where land ownership and caste go hand in hand and an honor culture thrives by maintaining caste and gender hierarchies. "The upper castes fiercely guard their hold over land and power in the community," says Ranbir Singh, a Haryana-based sociologist currently a consultant with the Haryana Institute of Rural Development. "They are able to mobilize young, educated but unemployed, mostly unmarried men, who are all fired up to shore up their self-esteem."

Perceived caste transgressions are severely punished. In a recent case in a Haryana village, an 18-year-old Dalit girl and her father were allegedly burned alive by upper-caste Jat men following an argument over a dog. Women, since they have property rights, are a threat if not kept under a vicelike grip. It is no surprise that Haryana, one of India's wealthiest states with a largely farm-based economy, has the highest rate of selectively aborting female fetuses, a practice that has skewed the demographics so much that there are only 861 women for 1,000 men. Young men are forced to purchase brides from other states. The statistics on honor killings are also the worst there: groups called khaps run kangaroo courts that routinely issue fatwa-like orders for the execution of those who have offended caste boundaries.

The situation is aggravated by modernity, as more and more young people want to marry for love instead of family or caste considerations. Khaps violently oppose both marriages between upper-caste women and lower-caste men and those within sub-castes and villages deemed to share kinship ties. The khap itself, long a locus of power for the land-owning Jat community, is being rendered irrelevant by economic change, increasingly egalitarian democratic politics and population movement — hence, say observers, this brutal attempt to re-establish its prerogatives. "Due to their declining status, they are trying to assert their existence by taking the law in their own hands," explains Prem Chowdhry, senior academic fellow at the New Delhi–based Indian Council of Historical Research.

Kenya: Religion, Law, Abortion, Sharia - and Land Reform

A very interesting commentary which highlights the fact that many 'religious' controversies are actually about land, resources, wealth distribution and power (Darfur, Israel/Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland, Somalia, etc.)

Kenya's efforts to pass a new constitution – aimed at preventing a repeat of 2007 ethnic violence – hit another hurdle this week, as judges ruled that it permits an Islamic 'khadi' court system that is discriminatory.

A three-judge panel said May 24 that the khadi court system, which arbitrates on matters of marriage and inheritance for Kenya’s Muslim minority, is discriminatory as it is based on religion. Kenyan law stipulates separation of church and state, though both the current constitution and the new draft constitution permit kadhi courts. A nationwide referendum on the draft constitution is set for Aug. 4.

Monday's ruling was reportedly praised by Kenya's church leaders, who in 2004 filed the original lawsuit against the constitutionality of kadhi courts. Nearly 70 percent of Kenya's population is Protestant or Roman Catholic and its powerful churches have already voiced opposition to the constitution because they say it eases restrictions on abortion.

"Kadhi courts are in fact a very minor part of the new draft," says Mwalimu Mati, director of a governance watchdog in favor of the new constitution. "But we are entering the phase where both sides of the referendum are starting to square up to each other, and it will be a dirty war in which any issue is fair game for manipulation."...

Opponents of the khadi courts argue that the new constitution allows the courts to extend their jurisdiction from the majority-Muslim Kenyan coast across the whole country, which they claim will open the way to strict sharia law.

"That’s patently absurd," says Hassan Omar Hassan, vice-chair of the Kenya National Human Rights Commission. "In fact, on both abortion and khadi courts, the new constitution barely changes the situation from the status quo we have now...
It is another example of an issue which has been hijacked by those opposed to the new constitution,"

At the same time, powerful Kenyan individuals who have built up large landholdings during previous governments...have reason to fear land reform clauses in the new constitution.

"I very much doubt that those ranged with the 'No' side really care that much about abortion or Islamic courts," says one European diplomat in Nairobi.."But they will jump on any bandwagon which will keep prying eyes out of their affairs by keeping things the way they are."

Historical tensions over land were key among the tensions whipped up following the last election in 2007, when violence left 1,300 people dead. There are growing concerns that unless the new constitution is approved – with its focus on land reform – the stage is set for further clashes as Kenya heads towards the next national poll, due in 2012.

NATO calls for investigation of Israeli attack on Gaza Aid Ship

NATO on Tuesday joined calls for a "prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation" into the raid. "As a matter of urgency, I also request the immediate release of the detained civilians and ships held by Israel," said NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in a statement after representatives of the alliance's 28 nations had me