Friday, November 30, 2007

Are You Smarter Than A Seventh Grader? (6:14 pm)

Ed Yohnka, Director of Communications and Public Policy over at the ACLU of Illinois, wants to know.

posted by Jarrett | 1 comment

11-Month Old Rape Victim In Congo Dies (3:46 pm)

You read that right. The BBC reported yesterday that an 11-month old rape victim has died in the Democratic Republic of Congo. One might want, as I wanted, to file this incident under “aberration,” but unfortunately the rape of very young girls, including babies, has been a part of the rape campaign in the Congo for years now, according to the 2004 article, Silence=Rape, published in The Nation:

Trevor Lowe, spokesperson for the UN World Food Program (said), “The nature of sexual violence in the DRC conflict is grotesque, completely abnormal,” he says. “Babies, children, women—nobody is being spared. For every woman speaking out, there are hundreds who’ve not yet emerged from the hell. Rape is so stigmatized in the DRC, and people are afraid of reprisals from rebels. It’s a complete and utter breakdown of norms. Like Rwanda, only worse.” Adds his colleague Christiane Berthiaume, “Never before have we found as many victims of rape in conflict situations as we are discovering in the DRC.”

American coverage of what is going on in the Congo has been pathetic. The New York Times published an excellent, thorough (albeit severely tardy) report a few months back about the Congo’s vortex of brutal sexual violence in which “women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen (there).” The gruesome, sickening stories in that one were hard to bear. But this has been years in the making and the Red Cross says the violence right now is worse than it’s been... read more

posted by Jarrett | 5 comments

Writaz Wit Attitude (2:21 pm)

Personally, I’d have gone with something more like this:

Straight outta Hollywood
Is a writer who will strike and ignite it
And make a studio exec bite it
Dangerous mothafucka who writes well
And leave fat cats with shit to sell

But this is still pretty good:

Hat tip to Hayes.

posted by Brian Cook | start the discussion

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Cigarettes, Toxic Waste, Graveyard Shift (11:44 am)

What do the above three things have in common? According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, they are all probable carcinogens:

It is a surprising twist for an idea that scientists first described as “wacky,” said Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist and professor at the University of Connecticut Health Center. In 1987, Stevens published a paper suggesting a link between light at night and breast cancer.

Back then, he was trying to figure out why breast cancer incidence suddenly shot up starting in the 1930s in industrialized societies, where nighttime work was considered a hallmark of progress. Most scientists were bewildered by his proposal.

But in recent years, several studies have found that women working at night for many years are indeed more prone to breast cancer, and that animals who have their light-dark schedules switched grow more cancerous tumors and die quicker. …
Scientists suspect that shift work is dangerous because it disrupts the circadian rhythm, the body’s biological clock. The hormone melatonin, which can suppress tumor development, is normally produced at night.

Light shuts down melatonin production, so people working in artificial light at night may have lower melatonin levels, which scientists think can raise their chances of developing cancer.

Sleep deprivation may also be a factor. People who work at night are not usually able to completely reverse their day and night cycles. “Night shift people tend to be day shift people who are trying to stay awake at night,” said Mark Rea, director of the Light Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, who is not connected to IARC or its expert panel.

Not getting enough sleep makes your immune system vulnerable to attack, and less able to fight off potentially cancerous cells.

While there are still “outside factors” to consider (including testing a broader population base), this re-classification could mark a significant change in the way we look at disease—and maybe even raise awareness regarding social status as a predicate for devastating illness.

posted by Erin Polgreen | 1 comment

A penny for your thoughts (10:29 am)

Eric Schlosser takes to the New York Times to lay out the nasty struggles going down in Florida’s tomato fields. After years of successfully fighting America’s largest fast food chains to achieve some level of workplace safety and wage stability (a penny raise for each 32-pound bucket of fruit picked), immigrant farmworkers — led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers — and their allies are running into the buzzsaw that is the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange and the private equity-backed Burger King.

This month the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, representing 90 percent of the state’s growers, announced that it will not allow any of its members to collect the extra penny for farm workers. Reggie Brown, the executive vice president of the group, described the surcharge for poor migrants as “pretty much near un-American.”

According to Burger King, they have no control over the business decisions of the growers they employ. Of course, E. coli threats give the company every reason to micro-manage livestock and meatpacking suppliers.

For more, read my piece about CIW’s Mickey D’s campaign last spring and Misha’s essay on CIW’s innovative organizing model.

posted by Adam Doster | start the discussion

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Bill O’Reilly is Worried About Your Children (6:13 pm)

Pink-pistol-packing lesbian gangs run rampant in the U.S.!

posted by Anna Schneider | 4 comments

TV Industry Flunks Diversity Report Card (11:17 am)

While the television writers’ strike continues, not much has been said about the lack of women and minority representation on TV and behind the scenes.

In an industry dominated primarily by white males, the statistics are alarming. According to a report released by the Writers Guild of America earlier this year, even though women represent more than half of the U.S. population, they have not made up more than 20 percent of industry employment. Minorities make up one out of every three people in the United States yet have been less than 10 percent of the industry’s workforce since the study began in 1982. That means in Hollywood, women and minorities are outnumbered 2 to 1 and 3 to 1, respectively.

In terms of overall salary, white male writers have earned the most. Women continue to make less than men, and the earnings gap between white male and minority writers have reached a 15-year high.

The TV representation of minorities isn’t faring too well, either. In late October, just a few days before the writers went on strike, a multi-ethnic media coalition consisting of Latino, Native American and Asian American organizations released a network “report card” for the major networks. (The NAACP is set to release its report in a few months.)

The overall grades were based primarily on the representation of minorities on network programming and the diversity of their writers and staff. The American Indian media group didn’t give letter grades but in a statement said that its ethnic group “remains underrepresented and misunderstood in the 21st century.” FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS were all given Cs by the Asian American Justice Center, while the National Latino Media Council’s ratings fared a little better, with grades ranging from A- to B-.

As writers try to get their residuals from new technology and the Internet, hopefully they will also consider addressing these gender and racial inequalities. That way marginalized groups have a chance to tell their own stories instead of having somebody else do it for them.

-Akito Yoshikane

posted by Intern | 2 comments

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Tasers as Torture (11:31 am)

More on the Taser Front: RawStory recently posted footage from a Nov. 26 recap of Taser-related deaths/interview with Amnesty International Executive Director Larry Cox. Cox repeatedly condemns the use of Tasers as a form of torture. As regular readers already know, this is an issue we’ve been covering since Nov. 2006, kicking off with Silja J.A. Talvi’s Stunning Revelations.

The clip provides a surprisingly thorough summary of the issue, but be warned: it’s not for the faint of heart.