Migration Category: National Old Site

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) voted yesterday to recommend that boys between 11 and 21 years old be vaccinated for the human papilloma virus (HPV). Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the Department of Preventative Medicine at Vanderbilt University, stated, “If the boys are also immunized, it reduces the transmission back and forth.”

Previously, the CDC only recommended the vaccine for women ages 9 to 26. According to CNN, HPV is the most prevalent disease in the United States and over 50 percent of people who are sexually active with become infected with HPV. The CDC indicated that the vaccines “were tested in thousands of people around the world. These studies showed no serious safety concerns.”

The Journal of the American Medical Association (AMA) reports that over one-third of American women are infected with the human papillomavirus (HPV) by the age of 24. While the majority of HPV strains are benign, some strains can cause cervical cancer and genital warts. About 2.2 percent of infected women have a strain that is high-risk for cervical cancer, the recent research finds. Gardasil, which prevents cervical cancer and genital warts caused by HPV types 6, 11, 16, and 18, was approved by the FDA in June 2006.

Yesterday, the Uniform Crime Report Subcommittee of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) voted unanimously to recommend a new, more inclusive definition of Rape in the UCR Report. The recommendation will be considered at a public meeting of the CJIS Advisory Policy Board in December. If approved, it will be forwarded to FBI Director Robert Mueller who will make the final decision.

The vote came after years of urging by feminist organizations, spearheaded for more than a decade by the Pennsylvania-based Women’s Law Project and reinforced by the Feminist Majority Foundation, the National Center for Women and Policing and Ms. magazine. This past year, the Rape is Rape campaign, launched by the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. Magazine and picked up by petition website Change.org resulted in nearly 140,000 emails to the FBI and the Department of Justice urging the change.

“Although long overdue, we are pleased that the FBI has vetted this extensively with their local and national law enforcement advisors and a clear consensus is emerging that a more accurate definition will better inform the public about the prevalence of serious sex crimes and will ultimately drive more resources to apprehend sexual offenders,” said Carol Tracy, Executive Director of the Women’s Law Project.

Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation, stated, “This will ensure the crime of rape is measured in a way that it includes all rape, and it will become a crime to which more resources are allocated. It’s intolerable the amount of violence against women, and we feel this will have a significant impact.”

The current definition from the 1920s, which has been criticized for underreporting rape and omitting a significant number of rape cases, defined “forcible rape” only as “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” In response to a recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), eighty percent of responding police departments agreed that the definition should be changed.

Now entering its third week, what began in New York with a few hundred activists has fast spread throughout the country, with over 1,300 cities or towns currently taking part in occupations. Occupy Wall Street, a movement that has given a voice to the growing discontent with corporatism and militarism in the U.S., has grown not only in numbers, but in scope. Activists shouting chants like “Tax the Rich, End the Wars” and “We will not pay for your crisis,” are also actively organizing for the environment, civil rights, reproductive rights, labor rights, education, and health care.

Now called Occupy Together, the response from mainstream media has evolved, and response of police and government has varied by time and place. In Des Moines, Iowa, 37 people were arrested Sunday after 500 gathered outside of the Iowa Statehouse, renaming the capitol complex “People’s Park.” 100 were arrested yesterday for occupying Boston’s financial district. In other cities, like Washington, D.C., there has been little clash with the police. The group currently occupying Freedom Plaza

In D.C. was granted a 4 month extension on their permit by the U.S. Park Police yesterday. Support from labor unions was strong last week, and this week several government officials voiced their support for the occupations, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who said in an interview last week that she supports the message that “change needs to happen.”

Occupations are also seeing a flood of support in donations from across the globe. Writer Naomi Klein spoke to the crowd in New York last week, saying, “the baffled pundits on TV ask ‘Why are they protesting?’ Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: ‘What took you so long? We’ve been wondering when you were going to show up.'” Klein ended her speech to the crowd saying, “Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.”

Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate announced Monday that petitioning in favor of a recall election for their Governor Rick Scott would begin on November 15. The move comes after Governor Scott was elected in November 2010 and came under heavy scrutiny for anti-labor rights laws he supported earlier this year. According to the Government Accountability Board (GAB), the state agency which oversees elections in Wisconsin, recall supporters will have until January 17 to collect 540,000 signatures in support of the measure.If these signatures are obtained, an election would be held sometime in Spring 2012.

Last week, state elections officials retreated from a plan that would have allowed residents of Wisconsin to download petitions supporting the recall from the Internet. Wisconsin Republicans came out against the new rule saying that this method would reshape the recall process. The GAB was also considering a rule that would have allowed stickers to be produced for Wisconsin students to make their school identification cards acceptable for newly enacted voter identification standards.

The GAB has now retreated from both proposals, although the Board will proceed with a vote this month that would provide an option for schools to issue two-year IDs acceptable for voter identification to students.

On Thursday, hundreds converged on Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. to begin an ongoing nonviolent presence, with the aim of ending corporatism and militarism, among other issues. The organizing group, called October 2011: Stop the Machine, has been organizing the event since February. The start of the event marks the 10 year anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan.

The presence speaks to growing energy and anger at tax cuts for the wealthy and trillions of tax dollars spent on wars as giant cuts are made to education and healthcare and unemployment and poverty rates continue to increase. Similar in spirit to Occupy Wall Street in New York, the October 2011 movement, technically a separate group, stands in solidarity with the occupations in New York and those in other parts of the country.

According to the organizers, the purpose of the presence in Freedom Plaza is to create solidarity among the people and groups who support peace and economic, environmental, and social justice, to demonstrate the power of nonviolence, and to affect change in governmental action.

Committees formed by occupants of Freedom Plaza will begin to form today on topics such as health care, education, elections, and the environment. Skill-sharing sessions and teach-ins are also being held. Food, legal, and medical tents have been established, along with an art space to make signs and a stage with sound equipment from which to hold evening assemblies. Contrary to what some media are calling a movement solely of young, white, middle-class college students, participants are extremely diverse in age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status. The group expects the numbers to grow over the coming days into the thousands.

On September 8, the Shawnee County District Attorney’s Office in Topeka, Kansas announced that it would no longer be prosecuting domestic violence cases. Prosecutors for the county told city officials that they will no longer be prosecuting any misdemeanor cases, including domestic violence, in an effort to cope with a 10 percent budget cut. The city is now considering repealing its domestic violence ordinance, in an attempt to force the county to resume the prosecution of domestic violence cases. Supporters of domestic violence victims are outraged over the decision, fearing that victims will be left without a voice in the justice system. “The city of Topeka just said domestic violence is legal and you can beat your wife,” said Claudine Dombrowski, a domestic violence advocate and survivor.

According to the Topeka Capitol- Journal Topeka City Council members are expected to meet next week to consider the proposed changes.

Students at UC Berkeley have been engaged in an ongoing debate and protest this week after a GOP campus group organized an anti-affirmative action bake sale on Tuesday. The group sold baked goods that were priced according to the race and gender of their costumers. The bake sale was designed to protest the California Senate Bill 185, which authorizes state universities to consider race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, along with other relevant factors for undergraduate admissions. The bill passed the state Legislature and must be signed by Governor Jerry Brown (D) by October 9.

In opposition to the bake sale, 200 students from a new campus organization called the Coalition gathered in silent protest, while dressed in all black. Ruben Canedo, a member of the group said that the protest was not only a response to the bake sale, “but to larger, systemic problems in the UC system.” Others protesting the bake sale held a counter-bake sale of their own, offering free baked goods.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the number of minority students at UC Berkeley has decreased since California enacted Proposition 209, a ban on race preferences in government programs, in 1996. Underrepresented minority students, including Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans, represent 16 percent of students, down from 20 percent in 1995 before Prop. 209 became law. The number of white students at the university has remained steady, representing 30 percent of the student population, while Chinese-American students have grown slightly from 19 to 20 percent.

Hundreds Of People packed the Capitol Rotunda in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Wednesday morning to call for the defeat of two bills that will restrict abortion access in Pennsylvania. The bills, SB 732 and SB 3, would require abortion clinics to become licensed as outpatient surgery clinics, and ban state-run health insurance providers from covering abortion care. The rally followed Tuesday’s effort by Pennsylvania Republican legislators to pass the anti-choice bills in the House.

Feminist Majority President Eleanor Smeal led the crowd of local feminists, physicians, patients, clergy, and reproductive health advocates. Smeal stated, “Anti-choice forces throughout the US are no longer chipping away at Roe; they are undertaking a full scale campaign to outlaw abortion through unnecessary regulation and will continue this campaign to deny women access to birth control. The bills proposed in Pennsylvania are in many ways worse than the provisions of the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act. Make no mistake – this is not about protecting women’s health – it is about controlling women’s lives.”

The new licensing requirements would close abortion clinics, drive the cost of an abortion up from $400 to over $1,000 at clinics and do nothing to increase patient safety. These bills threaten to close the doors of low-cost, affordable clinics that provide comprehensive reproductive health care, including annual exams, pap smears, breast cancer screenings, and STI testing and treatment. If the clinics are closed, preventative health care, including birth control, would become inaccessible to many uninsured and poor women in the state.

Sen. Jane Orie (R-Allegheny) described the anti-abortion legislation at the Capitol news conference as “paramount” to the Pennsylvania General Assembly’s anti-abortion rights “Pro-Life Caucus.”

Yesterday Tina Tchen, executive director of the White House Council on Women and Girls, John P. Holdren, policy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, and National Science Foundation (NSF) Director Subra Suresh announced their new initiative to promote work place flexibility to women and men involved in research careers. Tina Tchen stated, “Jump-starting girls’ interest in science, technology, engineering and math – the so-called STEM subjects – and boosting the percentage of women employed in science and engineering is not just the right thing to do but is also the smart thing to do for America’s future and the economy.”

The “NSF Career-Life Balance Initiative” includes a provision that will enable parents to delay their grants for up to one year to fulfill family obligations, such as caring for a newborn or newly adopted child. First Lady Michelle Obama remarked in a press conference yesterday, “If we’re going to out-innovate and out-educate the rest of the world, we’ve got to open doors for everyone. We need all hands on deck, and that means clearing hurdles for women and girls as they navigate careers in science, technology, engineering and math.”

Currently, 41 percent of doctoral degrees in STEM field are earned by women, but women only hold 28 percent of tenure track jobs in those fields. This is the first foundation-wide NSF initiative aimed to enable postdoctoral fellows and faculty members who are at the beginning of their career to balance work and family obligations.

At Arlington Community High School in Indianapolis, public school officials are separating male and female students even in the hallways, cafeterias, and on buses, in what they claim to be an effort to boost academic performance. Students say that they rarely see those of the opposite sex on school property.

According to the Indiana Department of Education, no other public school in the country has segregated students by gender to such an extent. Other schools, including one in Vermillion Parish, Louisiana, and one in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, have suspended or abandoned single sex education programs this year. The Vermillion Parish school board decision came after a court found, in a case argued by the ACLU, inadequate justification for segregating students by sex and other violations of Title IX, a law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in all levels of education. Similarly, the Lancaster school district rescinded the pilot program after “blistering” criticism of the blatant segregation and racial stereotyping.

Feminist Majority Foundation President Eleanor Smeal, stated, “Such extreme restrictions are reminiscent of the separation of the sexes in Saudi Arabia and in Taliban-like regimes. These restrictions are clearly in violation of Title IX and have nothing to do with academic performance.”

The Feminist Majority Foundation is currently working to rescind the 2006 Bush-era Title IX regulations that make it significantly easier to allow single-sex classrooms in public schools (pdf). Research studies indicate that such rigid separation of sexes leads to sex discrimination and sex stereotyping to the detriment of academic learning. Even the Bush administration’s examination of academic performance studies found the results to be “equivocal.” Where there are performance differences, they can be attributed to increased resources, smaller class sizes and additional teacher training, rather than sex segregation. Moreover, public single-sex classes or schools are rarely comparable for both sexes and can lead to gross violations of Title IX.

The segregation of students by sex in disadvantaged and predominantly African American schools could also include violations of the civil rights of students based on race, since white-dominated suburban schools are rarely, if ever, segregated on the basis of sex and generally have higher academic performance. Co-ed schools in the suburbs show that sex-segregation has nothing to do with academic performance, rather economic status does. Poor students inadequately fed and housed have a more difficult time staying in and performing in school because they are preoccupied with searching for employment and economic survival. Recent poverty studies show that in the United States, African American children are twice as likely to be living in poverty as their white counterparts. Thirty-nine percent of African American children and thirty-five percent of Latino children are living in poverty.

Yesterday, the California Supreme Court heard arguments concerning whether ProtectMarriage, supporters of Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage in California, have standing to represent the state by defending the law in the pending case in the US Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Court. ProtectMarriage has requested the standing to challenge Federal District Judge Vaughn 2010 ruling that Proposition 8 violates the federal constitutional rights of lesbians and gays because neither Governor Jerry Brown (D) nor Attorney General Kamala Harris will defend the law in the appeal.

Within 90 days, the seven members of the California Supreme Court will issue a decision regarding whether it will permit ProtectMarriage to represent the state in the Proposition 8 case. If the judges find that the challenging groups have standing, the court will then rule on the constitutionality of Proposition 8. However, if the California Supreme Court does not allow Proposition 8’s proponents to defend the law, same-sex marriages would be considered legal in California.

Roland Palencia, Executive Director of Equality California, stated, “Extremists that backed Proposition 8 want the court to grant them special authority to trump the decision of the Governor and the Attorney General. This request is not only ridiculous, it’s outrageous. Anti-equality individuals and organizations are not official representatives of the State and, despite their claims, they will not experience harm if same-sex couples once again have the freedom to marry. In fact, it is gay and lesbian couples and their families who are harmed every day that they are denied access to the fundamental right to marry.”

Judge Walker’s decision overturned a 6 to 1 ruling by the California Supreme Court which upheld the measure in May 2009. In 2008, Proposition 8 was passed by voters in an electoral referendum.

On Saturday, the Vatican issued a 24 page statement denying accusations made in an Irish government-mandated investigation, the Cloyn report, that the Vatican had thwarted the efforts of Irish bishops to protect children from sexual abuse. The Cloyn report states that the Vatican “effectively gave individual Irish bishops the freedom to ignore the procedures which they had agreed and gave comfort and support to those who…dissented from the stated official church policy.”

The Vatican’s defense comes after Prime Minster Enda Kenny and the Irish Parliament publically decried the Vatican in July for allegedly thwarting attempts of Irish bishops to report cases of child abuse to the police. Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore stated, “The sense of betrayal which was felt by the Irish people about this matter, and which was clearly expressed by [Kenny], came about not only because of the nature of child abuse itself but also because of the unique position which the Catholic Church enjoyed in this country, manifested in many ways, over many decades.”

Republican groups have spent approximately $800,000 on the special election in Nevada’s second district, to be held on September 13, to retain Republican control of the seat formerly held by Dean Heller, who will replace former US Senator John Ensign. The National Republican Congressional Committee spent $528,000 and American Crossroads added $250,000 in support of Republican candidate Mark Amodei in his race against Democrat Kate Marshall.

Following her nomination by the Democratic party to run in the special election, Marshall stated, “I am honored to receive this nomination, Nevadans deserve a voice in Congress that will fight for middle class families, and that’s what I intend to do. I’ll work every day to create jobs in northern Nevada.” Before serving as the state Treasurer, Marshall in the worked in the Department of Justice Anti-Trust Division and as the Senior Deputy Attorney General for Nevada.

Emily’s List, which focuses on getting pro-choice Democratic women elected to office, the National Alliance for Retired Americans, and the Feminist Majority have endorsed Marshall.

In Ghana, approximately 70 midwifery leaders met to participate in a workshop focusing on improving access to midwife services throughout the African continent. The workshop is organized by the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and will last for five days. Throughout the workshop, the leaders will work to develop plans to promote midwife education. According to UNFPA, approximately 358,000 women die annually from preventable complications in pregnancy and childbirth, and 90 percent of these deaths occur in developing nations.

ICM President Frances Day-Stirk stated, “Evidence shows that access to competent, educated midwives and high-quality midwifery services significantly reduces the number of women and babies who die in pregnancy and childbirth. As a result of ICM’s work, midwives now have global standards against which countries can assess their competencies, education and regulation of their workforce and save lives.”

In September, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the World Bank released a report stating that although maternal mortality rates have decreased by 34 percent since 1990, the decline in the rate of pregnancy-related deaths is not on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal target for 2015. Currently, there are approximately 1,000 maternal deaths per day caused by easily preventable conditions that include severe bleeding after childbirth, infections, hypertensive disorders, and unsafe abortion.