Up to 6 million females aborted over past decade, often when child was family’s second and they already had a daughter Families in India are increasingly aborting their second child if they know it to be a girl and they already have a daughter, a study shows. Scientists estimate that up to 6 million girls have been aborted in India over the past decade by couples who do not want a large family and are determined to have a son. The practice is more widespread among wealthier and better educated Indian families, who are better able to afford the prenatal tests and medical intervention they want. While it has been known that there has been a tendency to abort girls in India since the first census in 1871, the latest evidence suggests that the practice is common throughout the country. The research, published in the Lancet , suggests that the Indian government’s attempt to tackle the issue by outlawing ultrasound scans that identify the sex of a foetus has not worked. The Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act was passed in 1996 to stop medical staff telling parents the sex of a foetus. “It is unlikely that this act has been effective nationally because few health providers have been charged or convicted,” write the authors, Prof Prabhat Jha from the University of Toronto and colleagues from India, including the former registrar-general of India, Dr Jayant Banthia. “We are not surprised by this lack of prosecution given that most primary care is with unregulated private providers.” This year’s Indian census revealed that there are about 7.1 million fewer girls than boys under the age of six. The gap has grown substantially since the 2001 census, which found 6 million fewer girls, and the 1991 census, 4.2 million fewer. The researchers used census data to estimate the absolute numbers of abortions for reasons of sex selection. They used information on more than 250,000 births in national surveys to work out the difference in the girl-boy ratio in second births in families where the first child was a girl. They found that the ratio in second births where the first child was a daughter fell from 906 girls per 1,000 boys in 1990 to 836 in 2005 – a drop of 0.52% a year. But there was no decline in the ratio among couples whose first child was a son. The authors estimate that between 3 million and 6 million girls were aborted from 2000 to 2010. Over the 30 years from 1980 to 2010, there could have been as many as 12 million abortions of girls. In a commentary, two leading experts point out that the desire to have a son appears to influence the behaviour of expatriate Indians too. Higher ratios of sons to daughters in second births, when the first child was a girl, have been found among Indians living in the US. India Abortion Women Sarah Boseley guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Protesters convicted of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station break-in appeal over alleged suppressed evidence of police infiltrator Twenty environmental activists who were convicted of conspiring to shut down one of the UK’s biggest power stations are to launch an appeal after allegations that police suppressed potentially crucial evidence from an undercover officer. The 20 were found guilty of plotting to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station following a three-week criminal trial and police operation costing £700,000. But their convictions were thrown into doubt after revelations that they had been infiltrated by Mark Kennedy , a police spy who was alleged to have played a central role in the organising the plot. This led to Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, to ask senior barrister Claire Montgomery to conduct an independent review into the safety of the convictions. The review’s conclusion prompted Starmer to telephone the activists’ barrister offering to provide assistance in overturning the convictions . Today the 20 appellants formally submitted their application for permission to the court of appeal. In a joint statement they said: “Our case continues to demonstrate the state’s consistency in putting the interests of unlimited growth and unfettered capitalism before the rights and needs of people and planet. Our story began with the largest pre-emptive arrest of activists the UK has ever seen back in April 2009, and has since seen a random selection of us dragged through costly legal processes. The resulting consequence was 20 of us being convicted and sentenced for a crime we did not commit.” The statement added: “The launch of this appeal is just one small step in the fight back against the systemically political nature of policing. We stand in solidarity with all those who face repression for daring to take political action.” Mike Schwarz, the group’s lawyer said: “We shall follow the DPP’s response to the appeal with interest. We take the view that it is now incumbent on the crown – having assiduously and in such underhand and unaccountable ways gained so much personal information about the protest movement – to make amends. The crown should account fully and publicly to the court of appeal.” Revelations about Kennedy in the Guardian earlier this year have led to four inquiries amid admissions from police chiefs and ministers that the infiltration of protest groups has gone “badly wrong”. In one inquiry, the Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating the allegation that the police deliberately withheld evidence from court. Kennedy says he secretly taped protesters as they discussed plans to break into Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire in April 2009. The protesters want copies of these tapes and other reports of Kennedy’s operations to help their appeal, a move the CPS would now find hard to resist. The protesters say Kennedy’s evidence would have bolstered their defence in front of the jury. They had admitted the break-in plot, but insisted they were acting to prevent the greater crimes of death and serious injury caused by climate change. Prosecutors told the court that the protesters conspired to break into the power station as a stunt to attract publicity for their campaign against climate change. Activism Climate change Mark Kennedy Fossil fuels Coal Climate change Police Court of appeal Matthew Taylor guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Arnold Schwazenegger’s daughter apparently believed in forgive and forget. Now, it looks more like forget forgiveness from Katherine, 21. The eldest of the Terminator’s four kids—oops, make that five—deleted a weekend Tweet saying: “Sometimes we forgive people cause we want them back in our lives.” Her latest message…
Continue reading …Scott Brown is taking flak from fellow Republicans over an op-ed in Politico in which he explains why he opposes the House GOP budget drafted by Paul Ryan. The Massachusetts senator, who opposes Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare, “ought to be ashamed of himself,” says Rep. Joe Walsh, an Illinois…
Continue reading …Tennis players are notoriously finicky about equipment changes and the new balls being used at this year’s French Open have not gone unnoticed. The new balls, made by Babolat to replace the old Dunlops, are “very, very fast” and “really difficult to control,” said No. 2 seed Novak Djokovic, predicting…
Continue reading …The code-name British police have given President Obama for his three-day visit to the country has raised some eyebrows among Punjabi speakers. “Chalaque” means “smart alec” in the language, and is “sometimes used when we want to denigrate someone who we think is too clever for their own good,” explains…
Continue reading …Is Justin Bieber a Lost Boy? Apparently. At least, that’s what he looks like in the debut commercial for his just-launched perfume Someday (the antidote to Never Never). The Boy Wonder flies through the clouds with a girl looking suspiciously like Wendy before planting a kiss on her cheek in…
Continue reading …A British auction house has obtained what must be the most ill-fated time-off request in history. In the March 1932 letter, Adolf Hitler requests leave from his government job in order to run for president, the New York Daily News reports. The Nazi-led government of the state of Brunswick had…
Continue reading …The 2002 kidnapping and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl can be added to new al-Qaeda leader Saif al-Adel ‘s extensive record of murder and mayhem, according to Georgetown University’s Pearl Project. Investigators found that the Egyptian discussed the kidnapping with alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and…
Continue reading …Apache helicopters would mark ‘serious escalation’ of Libya conflict – Labour
May 24, 2011 No Comment
Shadow defence secretary attacks coalition for keeping public ‘in the dark’ as bipartisan stance on Libya suffers first serious split The deployment of Apache attack helicopters to Libya represents a “serious escalation” of the conflict, the shadow defence secretary, Jim Murphy, has warned. In the first major breach in the bipartisan approach to the bombing campaign, Murphy attacked the government for keeping the public and parliament in the dark about the deployment of the helicopters. Other MPs warned of “mission creep” and said the deployment showed that the NATO operation is now seeking to overthrow the Gaddafi regime rather than simply to protect civilians in Libya. Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat armed forces minister, was summoned to parliament to answer questions after the Guardian reported that Britain and France are to deploy the helicopters against Libya in an attempt to break the stalemate. Liam Fox, the defence secretary, is on an official visit to Washington. Harvey told MPs that Britain had not decided whether to deploy the helicopters. But a source from the Ministry of Defence said: “The chances are it is going to happen.” Murphy rounded on the government after Gérard Longuet, the French defence minister, said France would deploy 12 helicopters. Le Figaro quoted Longuet as saying that Britain would make a similar commitment and that Britain’s thinking was “the sooner the better”. The shadow defence secretary said: “The British people will desperately be concerned that French ministers seem to know about the deployment of British military equipment [sooner] than the British parliament. “Parliament hasn’t written the government a blank cheque on Libya. Ministers should never keep the British public in the dark on major deployments. This is a serious moment. It would be a serious escalation if such a commitment were to be made. Parliament should not and should never be kept in the dark.” Harvey insisted no decision has been made. “For the avoidance of all doubt, no such decision has been taken by the UK,” he said. “It is an option we are considering. No decision has been taken and there is absolutely no sense in which it is not true to say that we have kept parliament in the dark about a decision we have taken.” The armed forces minister said deploying the helicopters would not mark an escalation in the conflict. “I do not accept that if we were to take a decision at some point to use attack helicopters that that would be an escalation of what we are doing in Libya,” he said. “The targets would remain the same. It would simply be a tactical shift in what assets we use to try and hit those targets.” But Harvey said that deploying Apache helicopters would have major advantages. “The principal advantage it would give us over what we are doing at the moment would be the ability to strike moving targets with greater precision than we are able to, using the air assets we are currently deploying.” Others MPs warned that the NATO mission was now designed to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. David Winnick, the Labour MP for Walsall North, said: “Despite denials, UN security council resolution 1973 is in fact being used for regime change. Regime change is totally outside international law.” John Barron, the Conservative MP for Basildon and Billericay, said: “Whether or not we deploy Apache helicopters, the fact that a key NATO ally has represents a significant escalation in this conflict and reinforces the point that regime change has been the aim of our intervention.” Dennis Skinner, the Labour MP for Bolsover, said: “Hasn’t this intervention been subject to mission creep ever since it began? The statements that have been made in this house have indicated that – a little bit of help here, special forces there, further intervention. “Now the French, who initiated this intervention in the first place because of an election in France next year – there is no surprise to me that they are now telling the British government what the next phase is.” Chris Bryant, Labour’s former Europe minister, warned of a stalemate. He said: “The trouble is that if the government’s aim is not regime change then it is basically stalemate. How long is that stalemate going to go on?” Bernard Jenkin, the former Tory shadow defence secretary, issued a similar warning. “We either have to break the stalemate or broker a peace,” he said. Other MPs were supportive. Nicholas Soames, the former Tory defence minister, said: “The deployment, were it to happen, of the Apache would be entirely appropriate given particularly the change in tactics of the Gaddafi forces. [There is] the requirement to have a highly effective machine that is able to deal with the hard-to-find targets.” Sir Menzies Campbell, the former Lib Dem leader, said: “Were Apache helicopters to be deployed, which, after all, carry missiles, what would the difference in principle be between that and the use of fast jets carrying missiles?” Foreign policy Liberal-Conservative coalition Jim Murphy Labour Military Libya Middle East Africa Hélène Mulholland guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …