This week’s attack by Hustler Magazine on conservative pundit S.E. Cupp wasn’t the first time that the infamous porn rag printed a faked photograph of a celebrity with a penis in her mouth. But their weak attempt at justification—citing Cupp’s “dumb ideas like defunding Planned Parenthood”—represents a new low in political discourse. Such debasing sexualization of a female commentator as retribution for her political views sends a clear signal that women who voice their opinions in the public sphere do so only at risk of the most blatant objectification. More at the link

Amanda Marcotte weighs in

Nikolaj Nielsen | Brussels | May 23

euobserver - National Roma integration strategies submitted by member states to the European Commission fail to fully assess the needs of Europe's largest minority.

Speaking to reporters in Strasbourg on Wednesday (23 May), EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding said the desperate situation of Roma is "a wake-up call for leaders."

EU leaders in June 2011 had backed a European Commission plan to end the centuries-old exclusion of the continent's 10 to 12 million Roma minority. Most live in Bulgaria, followed by Slovakia, Romania and Hungary. Access to education, jobs, healthcare and housing are among the four policy priorities.

An Alabama newspaper exposed a scandal May 16 that deserves national prominence. The headline was "Federal judge's lengthy affair with court worker is exposed."

This is a scandal not simply for the judge, Mark Everett Fuller, shown at right in a photo by my research colleague Phil Fleming. It is a lifetime shame for those in the Justice Department, federal court system and the United States Senate who have coddled and protected him for an entire decade during his obvious previous disgraces.

It was fully a decade ago that Fuller was first accused by Alabama's pension officials at their highest level of trying to bilk the system out of $330,000. Yet Alabama's two senators pushed Fuller forward for a lifetime appointment, which Fuller received from voice vote by the United States Senate with no serious discussion of his past. Fuller and his court staff were even able to hide from public view a 180-page impeachment filing against him in 2003 with no apparent attempt at investigation.

A corrupt federal judge is in position to create vast harm in both civil and criminal cases, especially when he controls the court administrative system, as Fuller did during a seven-year term from 2004 to 2011 as chief judge for Alabama's most important federal district. This is the middle district surrounding the capital city of Montgomery.

Fret not, drone strike naysayers -- John Brennan has a list, and he's checking it twice:

White House counterterror chief John Brennan has seized the lead in guiding the debate on which terror leaders will be targeted for drone attacks or raids, establishing a new procedure to vet both military and CIA targets.

The move concentrates power over the use of lethal U.S. force outside war zones at the White House.

The process, which is about a month old, means Brennan's staff consults the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies as to who should go on the list, making a previous military-run review process in place since 2009 less relevant, according to two current and three former U.S. officials aware of the evolution in how the government targets terrorists.

In describing Brennan's arrangement to The Associated Press, the officials provided the first detailed description of the military's previous review process that set a schedule for killing or capturing terror leaders around the Arab world and beyond. They spoke on condition of anonymity because U.S. officials are not allowed to publicly describe the classified targeting program.

One senior administration official argues that Brennan's move adds another layer of review that augments rather than detracts from the Pentagon's role. The official says that in fact there will be more people at the table making the decisions, including representatives from every agency involved in counterterrorism, before they are reviewed by senior officials and ultimately the president.

Yep. Nothing beats normalizing the unthinkable via bureaucratic smoke & mirrors. Apparently Arendt's keystone work is to Obama as Orwell's was to W: not a cautionary tale, but, rather, a user's guide.

h/t Roland Paris

That's the pretty interesting, if simplistic, question posed by The Atlantic:

Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of radical life extension. As funding for anti-aging research has exploded, bioethicists have expressed alarm, reasoning that extreme longevity could have disastrous social effects. Some argue that longer life spans will mean stiffer competition for resources, or a wider gap between rich and poor. Others insist that the aging process is important because it gives death a kind of time release effect, which eases us into accepting it. These concerns are well founded. Life spans of several hundred years are bound to be socially disruptive in one way or another; if we're headed in that direction, it's best to start teasing out the difficulties now.

Cape Town | May 21

Reuters - Israeli goods produced in the occupied Palestinian territories and sold in South Africa may no longer be labelled "Made in Israel," the South African trade minister said on Monday, causing concern in Israel that other countries may follow suit.

"We are, through this notice, requiring that they be correctly labelled and it will then be up to consumers in South Africa whether they want to purchase those products or not," Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies told reporters.

"We are not seeking to prevent the entry of such products into South Africa," he said.

South Africa's trade with Israel is modest, but there is concern in Israel about broader economic and political damage.

A labelling change would bolster an international campaign by pro-Palestinian activists for a boycott of products made by Israeli factories in the West Bank, territory Israel captured in the 1967 war and which Palestinians want as part of a future state.

"If this will move to other places in the world, we will be in big trouble," Israeli Industry and Trade Minister Shalom Simhon told reporters before Davies's news conference.

The demand for a change in labelling was published in the government gazette earlier this month in a statement that said traders must not "incorrectly label products that originate from the Occupied Palestinian Territory" as products made in Israel.

Tyler Clementi committed suicide last year by jumping off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson valley. While it has never been definitively established that Clementi's suicide attempt was directly tied to an ugly incident where one of his roomates, Dharun Ravi, broadcast a sexual encounter between Clementi and another student, it's seems to have been the straw that broke Clementi's back.

Ravi has been tried and convicted on multiple counts of bullying and hate crimes, and is scheduled to be sentenced today. He faces up to 10 years in prison and therein lies an interesting tale: many gay advocates and advocacy groups do not want him to be jailed.

McClatchy has the 411:

Blind Chinese legal activist Chen Guangcheng, whose daring escape to the American embassy in Beijing last month sparked a diplomatic crisis, left China for the for the United States Saturday afternoon.

Chen’s departure – reportedly to Newark, N.J., on United Airlines -- brought to an end a nearly month-long saga that began on April 22 with Chen slipping away from his village in eastern China, where he’d been held in extra-judicial house detention for 19 months.

A U.S.-brokered deal earlier this month to allow Chen to leave the U.S. embassy after he hid there for six days brought considerable controversy and criticism from activists in China. There were widespread doubts about Beijing’s initial guarantees to safeguard Chen’s wellbeing and allow him to study at a Chinese university. That agreement shifted to one in which Beijing said it would accept Chen’s application for travel documents; New York University announced a fellowship awaited him.

The news on Saturday finally answered questions about whether China planned to live up to its end of the bargain. Efforts to reach Chen by phone on Saturday were unsuccessful, though he was quoted as telling the Associated Press from the airport that, “thousands of thoughts are surging to my mind.”

Auntie Beeb's Martin Patience has it right in my estimation: "[B]oth Beijing and Washington will want to put this affair behind them." But, as Patience further notes, despite a broader diplomatic crisis having largely been averted, this dispute "highlights profound differences between a superpower and a rising power on how they view the world." One assumes it will not be the last time.

Update: Apparently the US (via the Philippines) & China have profound differences on how they view the Scarborough Shoals (though beware simplistic, perpetually-revolutionary narratives from over-eager Trots -- the facts on the ground

are never quite that cut & dried, natch).

Benedict Carey | Princeton, N.J. | May 18

NYT — The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy.

Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, who turns 80 next week, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him.

He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright.

The word he sometimes uses to describe these limitations — pathetic — is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing, and junk studies.

Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation that supported the use of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality for people strongly motivated to change.
...
Dr. Spitzer’s fingers jerked over the keys, unreliably, as if choking on the words. And then it was done: a short letter to be published this month, in the same journal where the original study appeared.

“I believe,” it concludes, “I owe the gay community an apology.”

Naomi Wolf | May 17

Guardian Online - On Wednesday 16 May, at about 4pm, the republic of the United States of America was drawn back – at least for now – from a precipice that would have plunged our country into moral darkness. One brave and principled newly-appointed judge ruled against a law that would have brought the legal powers of the authorities of Guantánamo home to our own courthouses, streets and backyards.

US district judge Katherine Forrest, in New York City's eastern district, found that section 1021 – the key section of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – which had been rushed into law amid secrecy and in haste on New Year's Eve 2011, bestowing on any president the power to detain US citizens indefinitely, without charge or trial, "facially unconstitutional". Forrest concluded that the law does indeed have, as the journalists and peaceful activists who brought the lawsuit against the president and Leon Panetta have argued, a "chilling impact on first amendment rights". Her ruling enjoins that section of the NDAA from becoming law.

Forget Hallmark and Big Flora -- Mother's Day is (and always has been) for radicals:

Mother’s Day began in America in 1870 when Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation. Written in response to the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, her proclamation called on women to use their position as mothers to influence society in fighting for an end to all wars. She called for women to stand up against the unjust violence of war through their roles as wife and mother, to protest the futility of their sons killing other mothers’ sons.

Howe wrote:

Arise, then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Washington | May 10

AP - Department of justice files lawsuit against Arpaio over claims his immigration patrols in Arizona amounted to racial profiling.

Federal authorities have sued Joe Arpaio, America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff, after months of negotiations failed to yield an agreement to settle allegations that his Arizona police department racially profiled Latinos.

The US department of justice officials said the agency filed a lawsuit only once before in the 18-year history of its police reform work. The lawsuit escalates the standoff with Sheriff Arpaio, and puts the dispute on track to be decided by a federal judge.

Some may think Barack Obama's hand was forced.

Some may think it was a cynical ploy to garner Gay Money campaign contributions or to pander to the youth vote.

Some may simply shoot themselves and the right wing in the foot, talking about distractions that their own party has raised in the middle of a recovery.

Rupert Neate | May 6

The Guardian - Lloyds Banking Group has become embroiled in a row over its investment in a company accused of involvement in the rendition of terror suspects on behalf of the CIA.

Lloyds, which is just under 40% owned by the taxpayer, is one of a number of leading City institutions under fire for investing in US giant Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), which is accused of helping to organise covert US government flights of terror suspects to Guantánamo Bay and other clandestine "black sites" around the world.

Reprieve, the legal human rights charity run by the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, alleges that during the flights, suspects – some of whom were later proved innocent – were "stripped, dressed in a diaper and tracksuit, goggles and earphones, and had their hands and feet shackled". Once delivered to the clandestine locations, they were subjected to beatings and sleep deprivation and forced into stress positions, a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross says.

CSC, which is facing a backlash for allegedly botching its handling of a £3bn contract to upgrade the NHS IT system, has refused to comment on claims it was involved in rendition. It has also refused to sign a Reprieve pledge to "never knowingly facilitate torture" in the future. The claims about its involvement in rendition flights have not been confirmed.

Reprieve has written to CSC investors to ask them to put pressure on the company to take a public stand against torture.

Some of the City's biggest institutions, including Lloyds and insurer Aviva, have demanded that CSC immediately address allegations that it played a part in arranging extraordinary rendition flights.

DADA lives!

Keith B. Richburg & Jia Lynn Yang | Beijing | May 2

WaPo - Blind activist Chen Guangcheng, who fled de facto house arrest last month and sought refuge at the U.S. Embassy, left the diplomatic compound on Wednesday to seek medical treatment after receiving assurances from China’s government that he would be treated humanely, U.S. officials said.

But what had been described as a deal to guarantee Chen’s safety was quickly called into question by local Chinese activists and overseas human rights groups, who said they were worried that the Chinese authorities would not keep their word, and that the U.S. had no way to enforce the agreement.

Konstantin von Hammerstein, Christian Neef and Ralf Neukirch | Apr 30

Speigel Online - After years of pragmatic foreign policy, Chancellor Angela Merkel is suddenly putting human rights on center stage in her dealings with Ukraine. The country's handling of former opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko has Berlin up in arms. And Merkel is hoping to score an easy political victory.

- She still hopes that Yanukovich will eventually give in. Meanwhile, the Chancellery is already mapping out other scenarios for the event that he doesn't come around. If Tymoshenko is not released before the European Football Championship kicks off in June, the German team will probably have to play without Merkel in attendance.

That will show them! Of course if she really cared about human rights she would pull the team out and would have also pulled the German teams out of the Bahrain grand Prix

Martin Shaw provides a common-sensical (if somewhat understated) note of caution re: Obama's new Atrocities Prevention Board (chaired by 'Atrocities Czar' [sic] Samantha Power):

It is clear that counter-atrocity policy, now institutionalised in a way that entrenches its role as a "national interest", is taking ever-stronger shape under Obama. However, genocide campaigners should beware functioning as the administration’s cheerleaders. Even if atrocity-prevention is a national interest, that hardly means it will trump other national interests - strategic and commercial, for example. The fate of the "ethical dimension" of New Labour’s foreign policy is a warning: it remained just a dimension, and an increasingly subordinate one at that.

[...]

Although the administration sees atrocity-prevention as multilateral rather than unilateral, it makes no commitment to consistent multilateral action against atrocity. It is one thing to sanction your enemies in the name of fine ideals, but if you don’t mobilise the United Nations to do the same against your allies, these ideals are tarnished. Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s hesitation over acting against Hosni Mubarak and his military successors in Egypt, and against the repression carried out by the Saudi and Bahraini monarchies, suggests a strong danger in tying "atrocity" campaigning closely to official US policy.

Update: Ellen Brun and Jacques Hersh:

The problem with the conceptual framework of humanitarian interventionism is related to its abstraction from geoeconomics and geopolitics as well as disregard for the disparity of power and influence in the world. Notwithstanding the appeal of this discourse, the international system is not a level playing field. In a world where “might makes right,” the acceptance of Responsibility to Protect as the norm in inter-state relations gives the hegemonic powers ideological legitimization for intervening in weaker countries against noncompliant regimes.

Historical experience shows that there are good reasons to doubt the prevalence of humanitarian concerns as the foreign policy motivation of most nation-states. Not the least of which is the tendency of the big powers to cloak their foreign policy behind high-sounding moralistic discourses. The mixing of humanism and war on the part of an imperialist power is, and remains, an oxymoron.

ICYMI:

The Senate Intelligence Committee has been reviewing the post-9/11 detention and interrogation practices of the Central Intelligence Agency for four years and is still not finished. But the end appears to be in sight.

“The review itself is nearing completion — before the end of summer — but is not over yet,” a spokesperson for the Committee said. “The release date should be not too far thereafter, but is not set.”

“This review is the only comprehensive in-depth look at the facts and documents pertaining to the creation, management, and effectiveness of the CIA detention and interrogation program,” according to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who was chairman of the Intelligence Committee when the review began in 2008.

Committee staff are said to have reviewed millions of pages of classified documents pertaining to the CIA program.

Well, well, well. After 4 years and several million sheets of classified debasement, it sounds like the report may finally see daylight juuust in time to be placed under the blinding glare of the Campaign 2012 spotlight -- assuming the Village can tear itself away from teh horserace, of course (ooh, shiny).

h/t Daphne Eviatar

Related: Larry Siems of The Torture Report, who has compiled his exhaustive analysis of over 120,000 pages of CIA torture documents in a new book, gives his informed take on what W & co. wrought in the preceding decade:

Our highest government officials, up to and including President Bush, broke international and U.S. laws banning torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Worse, they made their subordinates in the military and civilian intelligence services break those laws for them.

When the men and women they asked to break those laws protested, knowing they could be prosecuted for torture, they pretended to rewrite the law. They commissioned legal opinions they said would shield those who carried out the abuses from being hauled into court, as the torture ban requires. “The law has been changed,” detainees around the world were told. “No rules apply.”

As they say, read the whole damn thing.

Washington | April 24

Huffington Post - In what has been hailed as a "landmark" move, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled Monday that employers which discriminates against an employee or potential employee based on their gender identity is in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on sex.

Having earlier filed a complaint on behalf of Mia Macy, a California transgender woman denied a job, the Transgender Law Center issued the following statement, re-printed in The Miami Herald among other publications, on the ruling:

Mona Eltahawy | The Middle East | May/June 2012

Foreign Policy - In "Distant View of a Minaret," the late and much-neglected Egyptian writer Alifa Rifaat begins her short story with a woman so unmoved by sex with her husband that as he focuses solely on his pleasure, she notices a spider web she must sweep off the ceiling and has time to ruminate on her husband's repeated refusal to prolong intercourse until she too climaxes, "as though purposely to deprive her." Just as her husband denies her an orgasm, the call to prayer interrupts his, and the man leaves. After washing up, she loses herself in prayer -- so much more satisfying that she can't wait until the next prayer -- and looks out onto the street from her balcony. She interrupts her reverie to make coffee dutifully for her husband to drink after his nap. Taking it to their bedroom to pour it in front of him as he prefers, she notices he is dead. She instructs their son to go and get a doctor. "She returned to the living room and poured out the coffee for herself. She was surprised at how calm she was," Rifaat writes.

In a crisp three-and-a-half pages, Rifaat lays out a trifecta of sex, death, and religion, a bulldozer that crushes denial and defensiveness to get at the pulsating heart of misogyny in the Middle East. There is no sugarcoating it. They don't hate us because of our freedoms, as the tired, post-9/11 American cliché had it. We have no freedoms because they hate us, as this Arab woman so powerfully says.

Yes: They hate us. It must be said.

Ewen MacAskill | Washington | Apr 22

The Guardian - The UN human rights inquiry will focus on the living conditions of the 2.7 million Native Americans living in the US

The UN is to conduct an investigation into the plight of US Native Americans, the first such mission in its history.

The human rights inquiry led by James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on indigenous peoples, is scheduled to begin on Monday.

Many of the country's estimated 2.7 million Native Americans live in federally recognised tribal areas which are plagued with unemployment, alcoholism, high suicide rates, incest and other social problems.

The UN mission is potentially contentious, with some US conservatives likely to object to international interference in domestic matters. Since being appointed as rapporteur in 2008, Anaya has focused on natives of Central and South America.

A UN statement said: "This will be the first mission to the US by an independent expert designated by the UN human rights council to report on the rights of the indigenous peoples."

Apr 8

The Guardian - In 2004, Fatima Bouchar and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, were detained en route to the UK, and rendered to Libya. This is the story of their imprisonment, and the trail of evidence that reveals the involvement of the British government

Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn't get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.(they knew she was 4 1/2 months pregnant)

Daya Gamage | Washington, DC | April 6

Asia Tribune - A Bush White House document that carried a memorandum written by a senior advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warning the Bush administration that its use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” interrogation techniques like waterboarding were “a felony war crime" has now been unraveled challenging the Obama White House to institute an investigation into American war crimes which clearly violated the International Humanitarian Law (IHL).

The Obama administration has gone on record that it will 'look forward' and 'not backward' meaning there will be no investigation of alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and violation of the IHL under the regime.