Picture of the Day: Chicago. Joshua Lott, a freelance photographer for Getty, is arrested while covering demonstrations against the NATO summit on it’s first day.
Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty. Via.
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This is about equity. Civilian women who depend on the federal government for health insurance — whether they are postal workers or Medicaid recipients — have the right to access affordable abortion care if they are sexually assaulted. It is only fair that the thousands of brave women in uniform fighting to protect our freedoms are treated the same.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the sponsor of an amendment to the Senate’s version of the defense budget removing some of the restrictions on abortion funding in military medical facilities (only in the cases of rape or incest, but this is a start), which was approved Thursday by the Senated Armed Services Committee.
Two female Army reservists have filed suit in district court against combat restriction policies.
Command Sergeant Major Jane Baldwin and Colonel Ellen Haring, are filing suit on the basis that a combat exclusion policy based “solely on sex” violates their due process rights under the Fifth Amendment.
They state that: “This limitation on plaintiffs’ careers restricts their current and future earnings, their potential for promotion and advancement, and their future retirement benefits,” a limitation sometimes referred to as the “brass ceiling” for female service-members.
[MSNBC]
Terrible Statistic of the Day:
- The Justice Department statistics report that 1 in 3 Native American women have been raped or have experienced an attempted rape, a number more than twice the national average.
Incidentally, House Republicans are against a bipartisan-supported provision in the Senate’s version of the Violence Against Women Act which would grant tribal courts greater authority to prosecute who are not Native American for abusing their Native American spouses and domestic partners. They have not included it in the House version of the bill and consider it a unacceptable expansion of tribal authority.
Picture of the Day: Karachi, Pakistan. After a rally organized by the smaller Awami Tehrik Party, but backed by several other parties, eleven people were killed and more than thirty injured in gunfire. Above, a young man, visibly wounded by a gunshot, flees the shooting. Those responsible for opening fire are not yet known. More from Dawn and AFP.
Credit: Faysal Mujeeb/Whitestar. Via.
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Free Morocco’s political prisoners!
- Mouad Belghouat, who raps under the name El Haqed (The Indignant), recently imprisoned for a one year sentence, his trial based on the criticism of security forces in his song “Kilaab Addawla (Dogs of the State).”
- Younes Belkhedim, considered the poet of the February 20 Movement, recently sentenced to two years in prison.
- Nadia Yassine, noted Islamist activist and opponent of the monarchy.
As well as a great deal of others and amnesty for those previously convicted and sentenced.
Check out Mamfakinch’s article (FR.) on the launch of their campaign to obtain amnesty for Morocco’s political prisoners.
I’ve heard from women all across New York who want nothing more than to take a leadership role on the frontlines defending our country. Just like it was wrong to discriminate against service members because of who they love, it is also wrong to deny combat roles to qualified women solely because of their gender.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who today introduced the Gender Equality in Combat Act to order the Pentagon to, within the year, set an end date for the military’s exclusion of women from combat.
Dear Senator Gillibrand: you are the BEST.
Picture of the Day: Karachi, Pakistan. Tankers usually used to truck NATO fuel supplies through Pakistan and into Afghanistan stay parked and unused near oil terminals in Pakistan’s main port city and economic hub.
News: Pakistan today hinted at the possibility of reopening the shuttered NATO supply routes to Afghanistan. Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said at a presser, “Pakistan has made a point, and now we can move on.” This hint was enough to officially earn Pakistan an invitation to the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago.
Credit: Asif Hassani/AFP/Getty. Via.
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Picture of the Day: Tripoli, Lebanon. A young boy sits on his father’s lap. His father is a gunman, currently involved in clashes that have spilled over from Syria into Lebanon.
Read: ”Trouble in Tripoli: Syrian Crisis Shifts the Stage” at Al-Akhbar; the AP report by Bassem Mroue; and “Lebanon’s Tripoli fears escalation of Syria spillover” from AFP.
Credit: Horst Faas/AP. Via.
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![Fact and Figure of the Day: In the academic year 2010-11, all of the top five recipients of money from the GI Bill’s education funds were for-profit institutions. They are shown above in a USA Today chart. Of the top ten recipients, eight were for-profit institutions.
Last year,Theodore Daywalt, CEO of VetJobs, told a Senate hearing that institutions like these (like DeVry and University of Phoenix) were looking at veterans as if they were “dollar signs in uniforms.”
Last June, PBS Frontline did an investigation into the profiteering done by institutions like these, targeting veterans with their GI Bill funds. For-profit institutions find the GI Bill so appealing because 10% of their funding is required to come from sources that are not federal student aid, and the GI Bill qualifies to fulfill that rule, known as the “90-10” rule.
President Obama this spring announced measures aimed at cracking down on these institutions… including better information provided to veterans by the Pentagon, trademarking of the term “GI Bill” by the VA so that others cannot use it as a recruitment strategy to market to potential veteran students, and a complaint system for veterans, among other things.
[Watch “Educating Sergeant Pantzke.”]
[Read the USA Today editorial on this kind of for-profit opportunism.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m40ky4fyF81qchhhqo1_250.png)
Fact and Figure of the Day: In the academic year 2010-11, all of the top five recipients of money from the GI Bill’s education funds were for-profit institutions. They are shown above in a USA Today chart. Of the top ten recipients, eight were for-profit institutions.
Last year,Theodore Daywalt, CEO of VetJobs, told a Senate hearing that institutions like these (like DeVry and University of Phoenix) were looking at veterans as if they were “dollar signs in uniforms.”
Last June, PBS Frontline did an investigation into the profiteering done by institutions like these, targeting veterans with their GI Bill funds. For-profit institutions find the GI Bill so appealing because 10% of their funding is required to come from sources that are not federal student aid, and the GI Bill qualifies to fulfill that rule, known as the “90-10” rule.
President Obama this spring announced measures aimed at cracking down on these institutions… including better information provided to veterans by the Pentagon, trademarking of the term “GI Bill” by the VA so that others cannot use it as a recruitment strategy to market to potential veteran students, and a complaint system for veterans, among other things.
[Watch “Educating Sergeant Pantzke.”]
[Read the USA Today editorial on this kind of for-profit opportunism.]
Picture of the Day: Moscow, Russia. Police attempt to disperse anti-Putin protesters.
News: After a stint as prime minister under Medvedev, Putin has once again been sworn in as president. He has nominated Medvedev as his prime minister. That’s not an endless revolving door or anything…. His inauguration was met with lots of protesting, and police rounded up anyone wearing the opposition’s symbolic white ribbon, arresting roughly 700 protesters as of Monday evening, and referring many of the young male detainees to the draft office.
Read: Julia Ioffe for the New Yorker’s News Desk: “Putin’s Inauguration: Satire and Violence” and Regina Smyth for the Monkey Cage: “Russia’s Growing Opposition.”
Watch: Video of riot police cracking down on anti-Putin protests.
Credit: Sergey Ponomarev/AP. Via.
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What are the top ten most censored countries? According to new analysis by the Committee to Protect Journalists, they are:
- Eritrea
- North Korea
- Syria
- Iran
- Equatorial Guinea
- Uzbekistan
- Burma
- Saudi Arabia
- Cuba
- Belarus
Happy World Press Freedom Day….
In general, and no matter what material we send, I suggest that we should distribute it to more than one channel, so that there will be healthy competition between the channels in broadcasting the material, so that no other channel takes the lead. It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox News, let her die in her anger.
A number of Bin Laden documents seized during last year’s raid have been posted online by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. One of the documents, outlining media strategy for the tenth anniversary of 9/11 contains some of OBL’s assessments of media outlets. He found MSNBC “good and neutral” until they fired Olbermann but was harsh on Fox News, saying:
From the professional point of view, they are all on one level- except (Fox News) which know, falls into the abyss as you and lacks neutrality too.
World Press Freedom Day Round-Up: “In 2012, 1 journalist is killed every 5 days.”
- Check out Global Voices’ Threatened Voices Project, which is a collaborative database that maps bloggers who have been threatened.
- The Committee to Protect Journalists has released a Journalist Security Guide that’s really comprehensive (H/T: Future Journalism Project)
- CPJ also has recent article on safer mobile use for journalists and a list of the 10 most censored countries.
- A WNYC interview with reporter Sebastian Junger about the organization he founded, Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues, after the death of his friend and colleague Tim Hetherington.
- UNESCO has used the Ushahidi platform to crowdsource a map of World Press Freedom celebrations.
- UNESCO is honoring Azerbaijani journalist Eynulla Fatullayev with its annual Guillermo Cano freedom prize.
- Human Rights Watch is calling for action against Azerbaijan’s “appalling record on freedom of expression.”
- Reporters Sans Frontières reminds us that one journalist is killed every five days (see photo above). This day can be a celebration of freedoms but it’s also a time to consider how much there is to condemn and fight against.
- Here’s RSF’s 2012 Press Freedom Index. And, I encourage you to read through basically everything RSF has posted about journalists under threat.
- The Journalists Freedoms Observatory is noting the deterioration of press freedom in Iraq.
- From Amnesty International: reports on journalists and bloggers under threat in Sudan, Iran and Cuba.
- The International Federation of Journalists has a recently released report on the state of press freedoms in South Asia.
- UNESCO released a report in late March titled “The Safety of Journalists and the Danger of Impunity.”
- There is much cause to examine Pakistan’s press freedom problems. A report has apparently been released by the Pakistan Press Foundation, but I can’t yet find a copy. Be on the look out.
- Freedom House’s 2012 Freedom of the Press survey has an unfortunate stat: only 14.5% of the world’s population live in a country with a free press. There is good news, though. Egypt, Libya and Tunisia have all shown marked improvements with the overthrows of Mubarak, Gaddhafi and Ben Ali.
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