Mamta and Madan Mitra’s Medieval Moralising

Kolkata police find holes in rape case; Mamata says cooked up
By: IANS Date: 2012-02-17 Place: Kolkata

As the Kolkata police said there were “certain technical discrepancies” in the rape complaint filed by an Anglo-Indian woman, a state minister questioned the morality of the woman and alleged that the complaint was fabricated to extort money.

West Bengal Chief Miniter Mamata Banerjee has termed the incident as “cooked up”.

The woman, a mother of two and former call centre employee, has alleged she was raped on the night of Feb 5. The police complaint was filed Feb 9, when the victim underwent a medical examination. She has accused Lavi Gidwani and four others of raping her.

“It is an attempt to criticise the police and the government. The police are taking all action to find out the truth,” Commissioner of Police R.K. Pachnanda said briefing the media.

He also rubbished the claims of police inaction. “There was no police inaction. Immediately after the case was registered on Feb 9, the police acted and several persons named Sharafat Ali, the name given by the complainant, were identified by the police.”

Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Damayanti Sen said the accused including Gidwani were not present at the place of occurrence.

“Till now as per their (accused) statements and the evidence available it seems that the persons (accused) were not present at the place of occurrence ¦ But it is too early to say that until further investigations conclusively prove that,” said Sen.

“It is a serious allegation. We are probing it. But the entire thing is not yet clear to us,” she said.

A highly placed police officer said Gidwani is in Canada and his father has produced all documents to prove it.

Later a Bengali news channel showed Gidwani saying he was in Canada on the date of the alleged crime.

“I was preparing for my upcoming exams on the day. I am still in Canada,” Gidwani told the channel on phone. He also confirmed that the two persons detained by the police in this connection were his friends.

Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee addressing the media at the state secretariat had claimed the entire matter was ‘cooked up with a view to malign the government’.

Trinamool Congress leader and Sports Minister Madan Mitra while talking to a TV channel questioned the morality of the woman and alleged that the complaint was fabricated to extort money.

“She has two children and so far as I know she is separated from her husband. What was she doing at a night club so late in the night?

“As far as I am concerned, based on the documentary proof that I have, I think it is a fabricated complaint made to extort money,” Mitra added.

The police have initiated a probe into allegations of the woman and one of her relatives that some policemen had misbehaved with them at the Park Street police station when she went to lodge a complaint.

The police also denied that they were trying to prove the victim wrong.

Related articles

• Police mocked me: Kolkata rape victim (ibnlive.in.com)
• Police questions Kolkata rape victim overnight (ibnlive.in.com)

Listen Up, Guys: If The Catholic Bishops Win, It’s The End of Sex As You Know It

One of the most stunning things about this whole contraception farce is the number of men who are still sitting this out, on the assumption that this is just another “women’s issue.” They don’t think they’ve got a dog in this fight; it’s got absolutely nothing to do with them.

Griswold v. Connecticut is nearly 50 years behind us, which means that three generations of American men have come of age under the sweet delusion that the not-getting-pregnant piece of their sex lives is handled by the same invisible fairies who clean the bathrooms. Since almost all of the top-shelf contraception methods are acquired and managed by women, men have apparently gotten very accustomed to not ever having to think about pregnancy at all. It’s her issue, her body, her problem. And so the politics of contraception have nothing to do with them, either.

Listen up, guys. We need to talk. Because if you don’t think this is your problem, you are simply not paying attention.

Here’s how this goes down. If contraception goes away, your sex life as you have known it is OVER. (It’s impossible to overstate this.) Say goodbye to one-night-stands, third-date sleepovers, friends-with-benefits, debauched Spring Break memories, Hooters, lap dances, living together before marriage, sleeping in the same bed after marriage, and all those friendly girls whose memory still makes you smile years later.

And say hello to stern fathers, uptight women, heavily chaperoned dates, guilt, shame, shotgun weddings, big and early families, separate bedrooms (the only form of birth control the Catholic bishops wholeheartedly approve of), and a whole lot more NO in your life than you can possibly even begin to imagine right now.

Also, gentlemen, make no mistake about this: going solo won’t provide much solace, either. Because once these people have succeeded in taking away your happy, easy love life, they’re coming after your porn stash next. They want you wanking even less than they want you fucking. Hope you enjoy frequent cold showers, because it’s about the only thing you’re going to have left when they’re done with you.

Don’t believe me? Ask you dad, or your granddad, or any straight male over the age of 60 about how it was when they were young. They’re the last ones left who are old enough to remember The World Before Griswold. If you’re younger than that, you cannot possibly have the barest freaking idea how awful it was.

If ignorance is bliss, American men are out there floating around in the seventh level of heaven right now. You’ve been lucky enough to live your lives in the most sexually open era in human history — and contraception is the one and only thing that made all that possible. If it goes away, it’s straight back to the Dark Ages — not just for us ladies, but for you, too.

It’s been lovely here on top of the world. But you need to look down, right now, to fully understand just how far you’ve got to fall.

Source- Sara Robinson, Alternet

Censorship in China

 

A new law could curb internet freedom.

Users of Sina Weibo, China‘s most popular micro-blogging website, will soon have to register under their real names. Critics of the law say this is further increasing the government’s control over online freedom. Yet despite pouring more and more resources into policing the web, the country’s netizens are finding ways to beat the system.

In this episode of The Stream, we speak to Eva Galperin (@evacide), an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Michael Anti (@mranti), a journalist and blogger.

How long can China manage to stem the flow of information and at what cost? Send us your thoughts and comments on Facebook or Twitter using hashtag #AJStream.

Read more at Al Jazeera

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WHO- contradictions- Gag order on Reproductive Health and Guidance for hormonal contraceptive

Invitees who attended back-to-back World Health Organization (WHO) consultations at the start of February were required to sign confidentiality agreements prohibiting them from talking about the meetings. They had to promise not to divulge anything that was said during the three days — not to colleagues, not to their networks, and especially not to journalists, who might misreport the facts. The world health body explained that journalists often exaggerate, and the UN doesn’t want to induce panic. The media will be informed when WHO holds an additional meeting of UN insiders on February 15, behind closed doors, and prepares a carefully worded public statement for release the next day.

The highly classified topic of discussion wasn’t a nuclear threat or a new virus that can kill within days. It was birth control.

WHO’s gag order is just the latest in a years-long effort by the United Nations’ AIDS apparatus to limit how much women know about possible links between HIV and injectable hormonal contraceptives. The UN appears to have forgotten that its job is not to control women’s sexual and reproductive decisions, but to inform them.

Here’s what the UN knows: In July 2011, researchers led by Renee Heffron at the University of Washington in Seattle presented findings from studies involving 3,790 sero-discordant couples (one HIV-negative and one HIV-positive partner) in east and southern Africa.1 The data compared women who had and women who had not used hormonal contraceptives during the research periods: twice as many HIV-negative hormonal contraceptive users acquired the virus. The rates of transmission from HIV-positive women to their male partners was also two times higher for users of hormonal contraceptives. (The findings focused on injectables because very few study participants took hormonal contraceptives in pill form, making the higher rates of HIV infection and transmission in that group “statistically insignificant.”)

In laypersons’ terms, hormonal contraceptives are products that adjust a woman’s hormone levels to prevent ovulation and pregnancy. In the east and southern African countries where the research was carried out, injectable hormonal contraceptives (“depot medroxyprogesterone acetate,” or DMPA) are the top choice of women who use contraceptives, and the Depo-Provera brand owned by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Inc. is the most widely used. Despite common side effects, popular features of the method are that one injection lasts three months, and a woman’s sex partner need not know that she is using a contraceptive.

The findings by Heffron and colleagues weren’t definitive; it would take years of additional research to determine beyond a doubt whether or not hormonal contraceptives actually double women’s risks of acquiring or transmitting HIV during unprotected sex. But the research team was concerned enough last July to say: “Our findings argue for policies to counsel women about the potential for increased HIV-1 risk with hormonal contraceptive use, especially injectable DMPA use, and the importance of dual protection with condoms to decrease HIV-1 risk.”

Read Original Artical here

and GUESS WHAT ?, WHO has just declared that “hormonal contraceptives are safe to use for women with or at risk of HIV” based on the meetings discussed below.

WHO upholds guidance on hormonal contraceptive use and HIV

Geneva, 16 February 2012. WHO has concluded, on the advice of its Guidelines Review Committee, that women living with HIV or at high risk of HIV can safely continue to use hormonal contraceptives to prevent pregnancy. The recommendation follows a thorough review of evidence about links between hormonal contraceptive use and HIV acquisition.

Current WHO recommendations in the Medical eligibility criteria for contraceptive use (2009 edition) therefore remain: there are no restrictions on the use of any hormonal contraceptive method for women living with HIV or at high risk of HIV. Couples seeking to prevent both unintended pregnancy and HIV should be strongly advised to use dual protection – condoms and another effective contraceptive method, such as hormonal contraceptives.

Read more here

Related articles

• HIV warning to women using injectable contraception (guardian.co.uk)