En la Red -In the Net - 4a semana de mayo

ESPAÑOL

Desde CIMAC:
GUATEMALA: Gladys Olas, Unidad de Defensoría de las Mujeres:
Aún con Ley, en Guatemala feminicidio se volvió epidemia - Por Gladis Torres Ruiz, México DF, 18 mayo 09 (CIMAC).- En Guatemala la violencia contra las mujeres se ha convertido en epidemia, y la aplicación de la justicia cada día es más difícil, pues aunque el año pasado 722 mujeres fueron asesinadas violentamente y que contamos con la Ley contra el Femicidio y otras Formas de Violencia contra las Mujeres, “todo se queda en la impunidad”, denunció Ana Gladys Olas Hidalgo, directora de la Unidad de Defensoría de las Mujeres de la Oficina del Ombudsman de Derechos Humanos de Guatemala.
Así lo afirmó durante la entrevista que sostuvo el pasado 13 de mayo con la delegación de activistas agrupadas en la “Misión de Observación y Denuncia Internacional contra la Violencia hacia las Mujeres en Guatemala”, organizada por la Red Petateras de Guatemala, en coordinación con Sinergia Noj, Radio Internacional Feminista (RIF), la Unión Nacional de Mujeres Guatemaltecas (UNAMG), Asociadas por lo Justo (JASS) y La Cuerda.

El orgasmo genera un estado alterado de la conciencia
En las mujeres dura más de 30 segundos, lo que rara vez ocurre en los hombres, comentan los expertos
por Emir Olivares Alonso para La Jornada, mayo 20, 2009 - El orgasmo es uno de los procesos biológicos más complicados que se conocen y se manifiesta de diferente manera entre los géneros. En las mujeres ese impulso dura más de 30 segundos y en los hombres es más breve, señalaron los científicos Carlos Beyer Flores y Barry Komisaruk, profesores del Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Avanzados (Cinvestav) Tlaxcala y del departamento de Sicología de la Universidad de Rutgers, Nueva Jersey, respectivamente.
Ambos especialistas advierten que, para llegar a esa sensación, la mayoría de los hombres forzosamente tienen que recibir estimulación física, en tanto las mujeres pueden experimentarla tan sólo por medio de fantasías.

Se disfrazan de levantones las desapariciones forzadas: Rosario Ibarra. - Por Fabiola Martínez para La Jornada, abril 17, 2009 - Personas desaparecidas, averiguaciones judiciales estériles, resguardos clandestinos y familias desesperadas. No es 1974, sino 2009.
Junto con la impunidad, las desapariciones forzadas de personas persisten en México, pero ahora disfrazadas de levantones supuestamente perpetrados por el narcotráfico, advierte Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, directora del Comité Eureka.
Al cumplirse dos años de las desapariciones de al menos 38 personas pertenecientes o vinculadas al sindicato petrolero, la también senadora se lamenta de lo que ocurre en el país y particularmente en Nuevo León, su tierra.
“¡Esto debería ser un escándalo nacional! Eso es lo que a mí me aterra: que vean estos casos como algo que le puede suceder a cualquiera. ¡Nada de que es el narcotráfico, eso no es cierto! Los de la delincuencia organizada tienen un modus operandi particular.

Encabezados por la hija de Raúl Castro, homosexuales se manifiestan en La Habana – por Gerardo Arreola, corresponsal de La Jornada, La Habana, 16 de mayo.- Al compás de la conga del trópico oriental de Cuba, cientos de gays y lesbianas recorrieron hoy el eje comercial y turístico de La Habana, encabezados por Mariela Castro, hija del presidente Raúl Castro, para abrir la celebración del día internacional contra la homofobia.
Más tarde, un debate abierto mostró que hay avances en la pugna por el respeto a la diversidad sexual en una nación donde hasta la década pasada persistía una ley homofóbica. Pero la discusión ilustró, también, que la policía y otras autoridades cubanas continúan hostilizando a homosexuales sólo por su apariencia.

Checa en SEMlac: www.redsemlac.net y www.redsemlac-cuba.net

Cuba: El problema es la homofobia, no los homosexuales
Uruguay: Habilitado el ingreso de homosexuales a las Fuerzas Armadas
Rigoberta Menchú: La democracia es una utopía para las mujeres
Colombia: Objeción de conciencia no aplica para negar abortos legales
Violencia: Golpiza, inacción policial y justicia inoperante
Cultura: Premio de la Latinidad a poetisa cubana
Periodismo: Premiada en México María Antonieta Flores

En Memoria Feminista:

En el caso de los feminicidios en México, exigimos castigo para los culpables - El caso de las mujeres desaparecidas y/o asesinadas en Ciudad Juárez ha pasado a formar ya parte de la historia de agravios del México contemporáneo. Lo más grave es que no son cosa del pasado...

$hile concertacionista y fascista: mas persecución, más montajes del estado $hileno contra mujeres y hombres del pueblo mapuche - Mari Mari Pu peñi, Pu Lamngen, Kom Pu Che - Mediante la presente queremos comunicar a nuestro Pueblo y a la opinión pública en general que hasta la fecha nos encontramos recluidos en la cárcel de Lebu, como víctimas de un montaje político-judicial, liderado por las empresas forestales y respaldado por el estado chileno.

ENGLISH

This Mom Didn’t Have to Die - By Nicholas D. Kristof for The New York Times, May 17, 2009 - Bo, Sierra Leone- On this trip through West Africa with my “win-a-trip” contest winner, I was reminded of one of the grimmest risks to human life here. Despite threats from warlords and exotic disease, it’s something even deadlier: motherhood.
One of the most dangerous things an African woman can do is become pregnant. So, along with the winner of my contest for college students, Paul Bowers, I have been visiting the forlorn hospitals here in West Africa. According to the World Health Organization, Sierra Leone has the highest maternal mortality in the world, and in several African countries, 1 woman in 10 ends up dying in childbirth.

Attack of the 66-year-old mother
The strange case of Elizabeth Adeney prompts the question: How old is too old to have a child? - By Amy Benfer for Salon.com, May. 19, 2009 | Having tired of the 12-year-old dad, the British tabloids are all aflutter over a new “act of breathtaking selfishness,” from a woman with a “strong sense of entitlement,” who has made a decision “sure to cause misery for parent and child.” Move over, Coctomom (sorry, just had to point out that new Nadya Suleman porno), there’s a brand-new Woman Making a Despicable Reproductive Choice.
The latest contender in the international gladiator match to crown the Worst Mother in the World just might be Nadya Suleman’s opposite: While the Octomom sucked at parenting because she was relatively young, broke and desperate for attention, Elizabeth Adeney is rich, reticent and really, really old. At 66, the British businesswoman is eight months pregnant with her first child, conceived in the Ukraine, where unlike in other parts of Europe, fertility treatments are available to anyone with the cash to pay for them (Britain’s National Health Service tends to cut women off at 40, and most British private clinics don’t like to treat any women over 50). While she’s got plenty of money to hire a young, live-in nanny, she is single, leading the papers to label her “the desperate divorcee.”

Ad tells teens: Have sex, give birth at school!- By Tracy Clark-Flory for Salon.com, May 16, 2009 - Legs splayed, thighs bloodied, a baby's head emerges from between her legs to the rowdy cries of the crowd. This isn't an episode of TLC's "Maternity Ward," though, it's a viral ad campaign: The mother is a schoolgirl, and she's giving birth on the playground. Not only that, but the whole school is watching. (OMG, embarrassing!).

The virginity fetish
Why is our culture so obsessed with girls' chastity? Author Jessica Valenti talks about how purity balls and "barely legal" porn both feed the same idea: That a woman's worth is between her legs. - By Tracy Clark-Flory for Salon.com, May. 16, 2009 | The world wants a piece of 22-year-old Natalie Dylan -- and not because of her glossy pout, smoky eyes or heaving chest. It's something far more coveted than beauty: her virginity. In a bold move that made headlines around the world this fall, Dylan put her purity on the auction block, promising Mr. Right Price a chance at deflowering her. The current high bid for this supposedly priceless commodity: $3.8 million.
That's just a sideshow in pop culture's chastity circus: Take 16-year-old "Hannah Montana" star Miley Cyrus, who has publicly vowed to wait until marriage, or the raft of other tween idols -- the Jonas Brothers, Disney's Selena Gomez and "American Idol" winner Jordin Sparks -- who like to flash their silver purity rings for the cameras. Toss in the popularity of "barely legal" porn, purity balls and costly "hymen repair," and you might start to wonder: What's with the virginity fetish?

Sale: Virginity for just $13K!
An 18-year-old auctions off her first time and falls far short of her target price - By Tracy Clark-Flory for Salon.com, May. 21, 2009 | I realize that nearly everything I've written in the last couple of days has had to do with virginity or abstinence. In fact, the other day, a reader posited that I have a serious virginity fetish that stems from my own regrettable early "loss of innocence" (for the record: It was neither especially early nor regrettable). But look, I'm not making this stuff up or even searching it out! Case in point: There comes news by way of the venerable Daily Mail of yet another virginity auction. This is, what, the third one, or is it the fourth -- who can keep track anymore? (Not even me, apparent virginity enthusiast that I am.)
After coming across news of Natalie Dylan's highly publicized purity sell-off, 18-year-old Alina Percea of Romania decided to go the same route so that she could pay her way through college. She also held out hope that the experience might yield a "nice man, like in the film 'Pretty Woman'" (to which sex workers the world over rolled their eyes) and, as luck would have it, she actually found herself attracted to the winner, a 45-year-old Italian businessman. But the next day it felt decidedly unlike a fairy tale: Percea had to don her own shining armor and ride off to the nearest pharmacy: "I took the morning-after pill," she says. That's because the business deal required that she have unsafe sex if the winner tested negative for STDs.

Sex and the Single Justice - By Eric Alterman (Center for American Progress), Posted May 14 09 - The Institute Fellow runs through the list of women on President Obama's nominee list for positions on the Supreme Court and questions why the media has been more curious about their sexual orientations rather than their qualifications.

Stop the biopharmaceutical bodysnatching!

The ACLU is suing to end corporate patents on the breast cancer gene. - By Abigail Kramer for Salon.com, May. 18, 2009 | In another piece of news from the human genome, the ACLU filed a lawsuit last week, challenging corporate patents on the two smidgens of DNA linked to heritable forms of breast and ovarian cancer.
When they're healthy, the two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, work to keep breast cells growing normally. But when they contain certain mutations, they can indicate that a woman has a 40-85 percent chance of developing cancer in her breasts or ovaries. Women with extensive family histories of cancer often choose to be screened for the mutations, since positive tests can indicate the need for precautionary measures such as more frequent mammograms or MRIs, prophylactic drugs or, in some cases, preventive mastectomies.
Even more important, many scientists believe that studying the genes could lead to better treatment of or a cure for the diseases, which are two of the most common forms of cancer in women. The hitch is that intellectual rights to the genes are legally owned by a company called Myriad Genetics, in conjunction with the University of Utah Research Foundation. Pharmaceutical companies like Myriad have argued that patenting genetic information promotes innovation by rewarding researchers for hefty financial investment.

Why Atheists Have Great Sex - By Greta Christina, for The Blowfish Blog.. Posted on May 14, 2009, - For some reason, the sex- positive community is also, very often, a spiritual community. (At least in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live.) It’s not often a conventionally religious community; but many varieties of Wicca, Goddess worship, shamanism, Tantra, astrology, chi, chakras, belief in a collective metaphysical consciousness, and other forms of New Age belief and magical thinking permeate it, both privately and publicly.
This troubles me. I am a hard- core atheist/ materialist/ naturalist/ humanist/ skeptic/ whatever you want to call someone who doesn’t believe in any supernatural entities or substances. And I’m just as unconvinced — and almost as troubled — by the ideas of the Goddess and chi energy and immortal consciousness and so on, as I am by the ideas of God and angels and Hell.

Men Are Turning Into Ken Dolls - By Trisha Gura, Huffington Post - Posted on May 14, 2009 - We've come a long way from the Brawny man, created in 1974 to sell paper towels. With his flannel shirt and crossed arms, he looks like a nonchalant lumberjack. He looks like a real man.
But times have changed (as has the Brawny man) since 1974. Modern male icons idealize a different aspect of the masculine. Take your typical cologne model, for instance -- tan angular face, straight white teeth, and a thick head of dark hair. No flannel shirt for this guy. In fact, he's not wearing much at all, showing off his bare, chiseled abs gleaming like the plastic six-pack on Barbie's boyfriend Ken.

GAY AND LESBIAN RIGHTS

Florida's GOP Governor Outed in Explosive Documentary - By John Byrne, Raw Story, Posted on May 8, 2009 - The Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, who is strongly considering a run for Senate, was outed in a independent film released on Friday.
The film, Outrage, tracks the outings of prominent gay political figures, such as Crist and former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman. It's being produced by Magnolia Pictures and will appear in Landmark Theaters across the country.
"Using some firsthand accounts of former sexual partners, old campaign footage (to occasionally humorous effect) and commentary from gay political media watchdogs, the film makes the case for each man's homosexuality, and presents his lifetime gay rights voting record," according to one reviewer. "In each instance, the disconnect is staggering.
"The usual suspects are all there: Craig, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, former New York mayor Ed Koch, former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, former Rep. Ed Schrock, even dusty McCarthy relic Roy Cohn."

Are transgender people mentally ill?

Activists protest this week's American Psychiatric Association meeting, where debate rages over the controversial "Gender Identity Disorder" - By Judy Berman for Salon.com, May. 20, 2009 | The LGBTcommunity has had a long, often painful relationship with the psychological profession. Until 1974, when the American Psychiatric Association(APA)voted to remove the diagnosis from the second edition of its "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of MentalDisorders"(DSM), the organization maintained that homosexuality was a mental illness. The change came slowly, after years of protest and debate.
At this year's APA meeting, in San Francisco, it is transgender activists who are demanding that the organization depathologize their identity. Their anger centers around the controversial diagnosis of "Gender Identity Disorder," which Psychology Today defines as "strong, persistent feelings of identification with the opposite gender and discomfort with one's own assigned sex. People with GID desire to live as members of the opposite sex and often dress and use mannerisms associated with the other gender."

HUMAN RIGHTS

Why We Can't See the Trees or the Forest
The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia - By Noam Chomsky , posted on May 19, 2009 at Tomdispatch.com - The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation, and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so.
For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantanamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law -- a place, incidentally, that Washington is using in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for the Bush administration's "black sites," or secret prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled.
More importantly, torture has been routinely practiced from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperial ventures of the "infant empire" -- as George Washington called the new republic -- extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere. Keep in mind as well that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion, and economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, much as in the case of other great powers.

New 'Prisoner Abuse' Photographs Emerge Despite US Bid to Block Publication - by Alex Spillius in Washington. Published on May 15, 2009 by The Telegraph/UK - Graphic photographs of alleged prisoner abuse, thought to be among up to 2,000 images Barack Obama is trying to prevent from being released, emerged yesterday.
The Shocking images of inmates in Iraq and Afghanistan were published just a day after the US president announced plans for a legal battle stop them ever being seen.
They risked provoking renewed hostility in the Middle East as Mr Obama attempts to build bridges with the Islamic world.
He is scheduled to make a major speech in Cairo on June 4 when he will launch his version of a plan to bring peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
One picture showed a prisoner hung up upside down while another showed a naked man smeared in excrement standing in a corridor with a guard standing menacingly in front of him. Another prisoner is handcuffed to the window frame of his cell with underpants pulled over his head.

The 13 people who made torture possible
The Bush administration's Torture 13. They authorized it, they decided how to implement it, and they crafted the legal fig leaf to justify it.
By Marcy Wheeler for Salon.com, May. 18, 2009 | On April 16, the Obama administration released four memos that were used to authorize torture in interrogations during the Bush administration. When President Obama released the memos, he said, "It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."
Yet 13 key people in the Bush administration cannot claim they relied on the memos from the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel. Some of the 13 manipulated the federal bureaucracy and the legal process to "preauthorize" torture in the days after 9/11. Others helped implement torture, and still others helped write the memos that provided the Bush administration with a legal fig leaf after torture had already begun.

Related Stories in Salon.com

A guide to Salon's investigation of torture, American-style - From Abu Ghraib to Abu Zubaydah, everything you need to know about torture during the Bush administration's war on terror. By Mark Benjamin

Soufan: CIA torture actually hindered our intelligence gathering - An FBI agent testifies that an al-Qaida prisoner provided useful intelligence until the CIA got rough -- and casts doubt on Bush's statements about the effectiveness of harsh interrogations. By Mark Benjamin

We tortured to justify war - Dick Cheney keeps saying "enhanced interrogation" was used to stop imminent attacks, but evidence is mounting that the real reason was to invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida. By Joe Conason

Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama
The 'Black Shirts' of Guantanamo routinely terrorize prisoners, breaking bones, gouging eyes, squeezing testicles, and 'dousing' them with chemicals.
By Jeremy Scahill Published on May 15, 2009 by Alternet - As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: "blows to [the] testicles;" "detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;" being "inoculated ... through injection with 'a disease for dog cysts;'" the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred "under the authority of American military personnel" and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.
More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.

Cheney, Master of Pain -By Maureen Dowd for The New York Times, May 17, 2009, Washington - Dick Cheney has done many dastardly things. But presiding over policies so saturnine that they ended up putting the liberal speaker from San Francisco on the hot seat about torture may be one of his proudest achievements.
Nancy Pelosi’s bad week of blithering responses about why she did nothing after being briefed on torture has given Republicans one of their happiest — and harpy-est — weeks in a long time. They relished casting Pelosi as contemptible for not fighting harder to stop their contemptible depredations against the Constitution. That’s Cheneyesque chutzpah.

Rice Stands by Bush Policies During Calgary Appearance - by Robert Remington, published on May 14, 2009 by The Calgary Herald (Canada) Calgary - There are days when former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice perhaps wishes she would have become the concert pianist that she dreamed of as a child.
One such day was last week, when a Grade 4 student at a Jewish primary school in Washington asked her about waterboarding at Guantanamo.
Another was Wednesday, when she was dogged by protesters in Calgary and a former aide testified at a U.S. congressional hearing that Bush administration officials engaged in a"collective failure" on the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.
But Rice, dubbed "the Warrior Princess" for her role in the Bush administration, told a Calgary audience Wednesday night that she is not bothered by such short-term views.

From DEMOCRACY NOW! Open the Gates that the Righteous Nation May Enter": Rumsfeld Used Biblical Quotes in Top-Secret Iraq War Briefings for Bush - GQ Magazine has revealed former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly gave President Bush top-secret briefings adorned with Biblical quotes during the early days of the invasion of Iraq. One briefing paper showed an image of a US soldier in Baghdad below the Biblical quote, "Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed."
Listen/Watch/Read: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/19/open_the_gates_that_the_righteous

Jeremy Scahill: "Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama" - Jeremy Scahill reports the Obama administration is continuing to use a notorious military police unit at Guantanamo that regularly brutalizes unarmed prisoners, including gang-beating them, breaking their bones, gouging their eyes and dousing them with chemicals. This force, officially known as the Immediate Reaction Force, has been labeled the "Extreme Repression Force" by Guantanamo prisoners, and human rights lawyers call their actions illegal.
Listen/Watch/Read:http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/19/jeremy_scahill_little_known_military_thug

Obama's Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice - By Prof James Petras for Global Research, May 17, 2009 - “The Deltas are psychos...You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force...”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980's. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal's rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.

IMMIGRATION AND CIVIL RIGHTS

From The Progress Report: President Obama will expand a Bush-era program with the goal of "checking the immigration status of virtually every person booked into local jails." Over the next four years, the program is estimated to "result in a tenfold increase in illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and identified for deportation."

U.S. to Expand Immigration Checks to All Local Jails
Obama Administration's Enforcement Push Could Lead to Sharp Increase in Deportation Cases - By Spencer S. Hsu for Washington, May 19, 2009 - The Obama administration is expanding a program initiated by President George W. Bush aimed at checking the immigration status of virtually every person booked into local jails. In four years, the measure could result in a tenfold increase in illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and identified for deportation, current and former U.S. officials said.
By matching inmates' fingerprints to federal immigration databases, authorities hope to pinpoint deportable illegal immigrants before they are released from custody. Inmates in federal and state prisons already are screened. But authorities generally lack the time and staff to do the same at local jails, which house up to twice as many illegal immigrants at any time and where inmates come and go more quickly.
The effort is likely to significantly reshape immigration enforcement, current and former executive branch officials said. It comes as the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress vow to crack down on illegal immigrants who commit crimes, rather than those who otherwise abide by the law.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has made it "very clear" that her top priority is deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes, said David J. Venturella, program director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.