Soviet Capital
The irony here is so sweet: Empowered by an oil boom that pushed the country’s trade surplus past $94 billion this year, Russia has been flexing its muscles abroad. At home, meanwhile, young and trendy Muscovites are in the throes of nostalgia for the staples of Soviet childhoods, relics of a time when the U.S.S.R. [...]
...read morePoliticians and Rape: For Once, Good News
This made my day. Tory leader David Cameron is proposing broad educational and service-based responses to sexual assault: He pledged longer-term funding for rape crisis centres, to change attitudes towards rape through sex education and announced a Tory review of sentencing. The government says it has taken action to improve conviction rates. In a speech [...]
...read moreInteresting fact of the day that I learned from CNN International:
According to an obscure law in Liverpool, it is illegal for a woman to be topless unless she is working as a clerk in a tropical fish store.
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Black Sheep
Hey look, right-wing xenophobic anti-immigrant assholes are assholes in other countries too! The posters taped on the walls at a political rally here capture the rawness of Switzerland’s national electoral campaign: three white sheep stand on the Swiss flag as one of them kicks a single black sheep away. To Create Security,” the poster reads. [...]
...read moreNo, sir, my use of the n-word was in no way intended to be racist
…right. A Tory aide was suspended today for allegedly posting images on the internet of a fellow researcher with her face blacked up accompanied by a racist insult. [...] Philip Clarke, a parliamentary aide to the former attorney general Lord Lyell, was responsible for posting the photographs, according to the website, and the 24-year-old has [...]
...read moreMaybe just throw holy water on them
[Italian Interior Minister Giulio Amato] told a Senate committee he was examining efforts to keep prostitutes off the streets where they were near children or places of worship. And not to, say, end trafficking or battle human rights violations or ensure that sex workers aren’t abused. Nah. Just keep them away from kids and church. [...]
...read moreLegal Abortion Saves Lives
Illegal abortion is a human rights violation and a public health disaster. “Pro-life” policies are wreaking havoc world-wide, killing and injuring women and perpetuating inequality. First, we have Trinidad and Tobago: For seven years ASPIRE has planted its abortion law reform lobby on public health ground. The NGO has cited disturbing statistics culled from Ministry [...]
...read moreMake a baby, win a car
This is especially interesting on the heels of this: Russia is giving people a day off of work to have sex. And if you give birth exactly nine months later, you get a prize, which might be anything from money to a refrigerator to a car. It’s being called National Conception Day — which isn’t [...]
...read moreRapist coddled because his victim “didn’t look 10″
The judge thinks she looked 16 and she was wearing a frilly bra and a thong, so raping her ain’t no big thing. This is the same judge who apparently ordered a pedophile to buy his victim a new bicycle. The article, in its entirety: A JUDGE spared a man who raped a girl of [...]
...read more“Pro-life” Laws: Totally Fucked.
This seems relevant. In Brazil, poor women are routinely maimed and even killed by illegal abortion. But that’s cool with the “pro-life” Catholic church, so long as women have to be held “responsible” for their misbehavior by dying. And that goes for contracting HIV, too. No, really: “We cannot agree with condoms because they turn [...]
...read moreLet’s Talk About Sex
in the Arab world. Awesome. Dr. Heba Kotb is tackling a taboo in the Arab world unlike anyone else: She’s talking about sex openly on a show broadcast all over the Middle East. It’s a big first in these parts of the world, and Kotb leaves little uncovered. “We talk about masturbation … sex over [...]
...read moreGood International Repro Rights News
The president of Portugal has ratified a law legalizing abortion in the first ten weeks of pregnancy. And the Minister of Health in Brazil has called for greater dialogue about reproductive rights. Abortion is illegal in Brazil (with health and rape exceptions), but the country has a very high abortion rate — higher than the [...]
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