Whoever is doing the bombing. And certainly the first piece of film is of a Syrian Army barrel bomb being dropped on a school or hospital. And the genesis of this piece of film is uncertain. It could be IS. It could be the FSA. It could be independent. It could be propaganda by one side or the other, or it could simply be a desperate plea for sanity.
But it doesn’t really matter. This is about the children. Whichever side they’re on. The pictures aren’t fake.
Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Let’s make it stop.
Let’s stop supplying the combatants with arms, while we try and “pick winners”. Let us make our effort to create peace dialogues not war victories. And above all, let’s stop dropping bombs on civilians.Whoever we are.
And the civilians are everywhere.
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The December 2012 Delhi gang rape which resulted in the victim’s death shocked India
A 14-year-old Indian girl has died and her mother was seriously injured when they were allegedly thrown off a bus by the staff who tried to molest them.
Three men, including the bus conductor and his assistant, have been arrested.
The girl was travelling in Punjab’s Moga district along with her mother and younger brother. The bus had a few passengers at the time of the assault.
The crime is horrifyingly reminiscent of the widely December 2012 gang rape where a 23 year old student was assaulted on a bus in Delhi and subsequently died from injuries sustained during the attack. The crime shocked India and the world and raised an ongoing public debate over the treatment of women in the country.
In the latest incident, the girl’s family had boarded the bus from their village to visit a gurudwara (Sikh temple) on Wednesday evening, reports NDTV.
“They kept abusing us. No one helped. They first pushed my daughter off the bus, then me,” the channel quoted the mother, who has been admitted to hospital, as saying.
Police said they had seized the bus and were investigating the case.
Rape is virtually endemic in India, as is violence against women generally. The patriarchal attitudes that lead to this were exemplified by one of the men convicted for raping and killing a woman in a shocking and brutal 2012 gang attack on a New Delhi bus said in a TV documentary that if their victim had not fought back she would not have been killed.
Instead, the 23-year-old woman should have remained silent, said Mukesh Singh, who was driving the bus when the woman was attacked.
“Then they would have dropped her off after ‘doing her,'” he said in a documentary being released next week. The filmmakers released transcripts of the interview, which was recorded in 2013, in early March.
Singh and three other attackers were convicted in a fast-track court in 2013. The appeals against their death sentences are pending in the Supreme Court.
“A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy,” he said, according to the transcripts. “A decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at night …. Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes.”
The woman and her male friend were returning home from seeing a movie at an upscale mall when they got on the bus. The attackers beat her friend and took turns raping the woman. They penetrated her with a metal rod, leaving severe internal injuries that caused her death.
India, where many people have long believed that women are responsible for rape, was shocked into action after the attack. The Indian government rushed legislation doubling prison terms for rapists to 20 years and criminalising voyeurism, stalking and the trafficking of women. The law also makes it a crime for police officers to refuse to open cases when complaints are made.
In the interview, Singh suggested that the attack was to teach the woman and her male friend a lesson that they should not have been out late at night. He also reiterated that rape victims should not fight back: “She should just be silent and allow the rape.”
He also said that the death penalty would make things even more dangerous for women: “Now when they rape, they won’t leave the girl like we did. They will kill her.”
Singh’s interview is from the documentary “India’s Daughter” by British filmmaker Leslee Udwin. It was shown on March 8, International Women’s Day, in India, Britain, Denmark, Sweden and several other countries.
Whoever we are, wherever we go, yes means yes, no means no.
As always, it is male attitudes that put women at risk, not womens’ behaviour.
In a case which starkly highlights yet again the plight of women in developing societies, a 17-year-old Indian girl who was gang-raped committed suicide after police pressured her to drop the case and marry one of her attackers, police and a relative said on Thursday.
Amid the ongoing riots and uproar over the gang-rape of a student on a bus in New Delhi earlier this month, the latest case has again shone a harsh spotlight on the police’s handling of sex crimes.
One police officer has been sacked and another suspended over their conduct after the assault during the festival of Diwali on November 13 in the Patiala region in the Punjab, according to officials.
The teenager was found dead on Wednesday night after swallowing poison.
Inspector General Paramjit Singh Gill said that the teenager had been “running from pillar to post to get her case registered” but officers failed to open a formal inquiry.
“One of the officers tried to convince her to withdraw the case,” Gill, the police chief for the area, told AFP.
Before her death, there had been no arrests over her case although three people were detained on Thursday. Two of them were her alleged male attackers and the third was a suspected woman accomplice.
The victim’s sister told Indian television that the teenager had been urged to either accept a cash settlement or marry one of her attackers.
“The police started pressuring her to either reach a financial settlement with her attackers or marry one of them,” her sister told the NDTV network.
Meanwhile, the Press Trust of India reported that a police officer has been suspended for allegedly refusing to register a rape complaint in the northern state of Chhattisgar.
The woman and her husband later brought the case to the attention of a more senior officer and a hunt has now been launched for her attacker, an auto rickshaw driver.
Official figures show that 228,650 of the total 256,329 violent crimes recorded last year in India were against women.
The real figure is thought to be much higher as so many women are reluctant to report attacks to the police.
During an address to the chief ministers of India’s states on Thursday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledged to bring in new laws to cover attacks on women.
Pressure from feminists all over the world would assist Governments who seek to drag their male-dominated societies kicking and screaming into the 21st century. We need to make far faster progress throughout Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and many places in Africa, in particular.
And just for the record, rape is NEVER – under any circumstances – the fault of the victim. Whoever we are. Wherever we go. Yes means Yes. And No means No. Find this and other radical and feminist shirts at www.cafepress.com/yolly.
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I am really rather delighted that Rush Limbaugh appears to be reaping what he has so irresponsibly sown.
It is proof, if proof were needed, that democratic principles are alive and well in America, (and around the world), that ordinary people can still be stirred into action in defence of decency, and that freedom of speech does not mean freedom to lie, and abuse.
Trenchant political comment is fair play and in the USA, proudly and laudably, it is explicitly supported by the first Amendment – it would weaken our political discourse were Americans (or anyone else) not able to say that Rush Limbaugh is a chauvinist pig for his comments, as with the shirt above – but outright lying, such as saying Fluke was calling for taxpayer-funded contraception when she was not or calling a woman arguing for reproductive health a “slut” and a “prostitute” – and much else – is a different matter entirely.
There is a line. And Limbaugh ran across it with enthusiasm.
In short, Sandra Fluke is vindicated. And people power still exists. It has just been reported, apparently, that he will not be on his show on Monday. Sore throat from eating his own words? We will see.
Spurred on by more than 120,000 members of the Daily Kos community like you, this week over 50 companies and organizations pulled their advertisements from Rush Limbaugh’s radio program.
Yesterday (Thursday), the results of your action could be heard in the form of beautiful, long silences during the commercial breaks in the online streaming of Limbaugh’s show on WABC, the flagship station for his broadcasts (as often proclaimed by Rush).
Here are the amazing stats:
A total of 86 ads aired during WABC’s online streaming broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show yesterday;
77 of those ads were public service announcements donated free of charge by the Ad Council;
Of the nine paid spots that ran, seven were from companies that have said they have taken steps to ensure their ads no longer air during the program;
WABC’s online feed included about 5:33 of dead air when ads would normally have run.
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It's the thin line between reality and fantasy. It's the thin line between sanity and madness. It's the crazy things that make us think, laugh and scream in the dark.
Well, This Is What I Think 