Canadian Politics
- Conservative MP Brad Trost suggested in an interview published this week that Diane Ablonczy was removed as head of the Marquee Tourism Events Program because she provided $400,000 to Toronto Pride Week – to the shock and dismay of her Tory caucus colleagues and the social conservatives that back the party. Government officials denied Ablonczy was being punished.
- Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon called in Iran’s top diplomat in Ottawa this week for a third blast over Tehran’s treatment of election protesters and the detention of Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari. Mr. Bahari is a dual citizen who was arrested June 21 and held without charge.
American Politics
- Republican Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska announced last week that she will resign her office July 26, fueling speculation that she intends to spend the next four years pursuing her party’s presidential nomination in 2012.
- The Maine Human Rights Commission ruled Monday that the Orono School Department discriminated against a transgender child by denying her access to the girl’s bathroom. While the school department’s lawyer warned that schools around the state may not be ready to manage the practical fallout from the decision, civil liberties advocates hailed the ruling as an advancement of human rights.
- Police arrested 26 members of the Health Global Access Project on Thursday when they refused to abandon a protest at the lack of federal funding for HIV/AIDS programs that they were holding in the rotunda of the Capitol Building in Washington DC. Their aim was to draw attention to what they consider to be a failure by the Obama administration to allocate sufficient funds to the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Reproductive Choice
- Pregnant women in Peru are dying at scandalous rates, according to an Amnesty International report into maternal mortality released this week. The report found that hundreds of poor, rural and indigenous pregnant women are dying because they are being denied the same health services as other women in the country. Peruvian government figures state 185 in every 100,000 women die in childbirth, but the United Nations says the number is much higher, 240 per 100,000, which makes it one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the Americas.
- Pregnant women uprooted by the violence in the northwest region of Pakistan have suffered acutely in refugee camps for the internally displaced, says the United Nations Population Fund. According to its estimates, some 69,000 pregnant women have been displaced since the start of military operations on April 27. There were nearly 6,000 new births to displaced mothers in June, of which at least 900 required surgery because of complications.
Gendered Violence
- The Afghan Shia Personal Status law which legalized rape within marriage has been sent back to parliament after judicial review with a clause letting husbands starve their wives if they refuse to have sex. It is due to be ratified by parliament, which first passed the legislation in March with hardly any debate. Meanwhile, the UN said this week that women in Afghanistan are the targets of increasing violence and other human rights abuses that President Hamid Karzai’s government is doing little to stop. It cited a culture of impunity for perpetrators of attacks and the government’s failure to criminalize rape or submit a report on discrimination against women that is five years overdue.
Economic Crisis
- According to a new report by the Fawcett Society and Oxfam, about 40 per cent of ethnic minority women in the United Kingdom are living in poverty, twice the proportion of white women. Poverty extends to more than a third of black women and almost two thirds of Pakistani and Bangladeshi women. The report says that the current recession poses the risk that ethnic minority women living in poverty will be locked into their destitution for the foreseeable future and that even more ethnic minority women will be made vulnerable to poverty.
Health
- A third of women diagnosed with breast cancer in public screening programmes are treated needlessly because their tumour will not be life-threatening, the British Medical Journal reported Friday.
International
- With the presence of U.S. soldiers, prostitution is flourishing near the Camp Stanley Camptown close to Seoul. Since 1945, U.S. troops have been stationed in the Korean peninsula, with their current strength estimated to be 28,500. Prostitution in the region is a direct result of their presence, local observers say. U.S. officials have made statements condemning prostitution but have done little to stop it.
- The Mozambique parliament in Africa passed the first draft of a bill against domestic violence on June 29. The bill imposes harsher penalties for crimes of domestic violence; currently domestic violence is treated as a simple assault case.
- French lawmakers opened hearings Wednesday on whether to ban the burka, calling in experts who said France should act to discourage Muslim women from wearing the head-to-toe veil.
- Possession of pornography is now a criminal offense in Ukraine. Human rights activists and members of the Ukrainian artistic community had asked the president to veto the law, but he signed it this week. Now pornography can be kept only “for medical purposes,” according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice.
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