More articles. (Brace yourselves.)
Nov. 18th, 2010 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
First, let me say that I'm told the previous article in diabetes IS, in fact, really bad. My apologies.
One on the avoidance of the term "rape" for children who clearly WERE raped.
On the trend of diagnosing children with bipolar disorder - worth reading
A 1960s parody of commercials
The Pope has more or less approved condom use by male prostitutes to prevent the spread of AIDS. This is one of those situations where, if you can get inside the logic that leads to "condoms for male hookers = yes, condoms for married couples = no" it makes internal sense. I guess.
On good airport security
Canada wants more immigrants.
As waves of immigrants from the developing world remade Canada a decade ago, the famously friendly people of Manitoba could not contain their pique.
What irked them was not the Babel of tongues, the billions spent on health care and social services, or the explosion of ethnic identities. The rub was the newcomers’ preference for “M.T.V.” — Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver — over the humble prairie province north of North Dakota, which coveted workers and population growth.
Demanding “our fair share,” Manitobans did something hard to imagine in American politics, where concern over illegal immigrants dominates public debate and states seek more power to keep them out. In Canada, which has little illegal immigration, Manitoba won new power to bring foreigners in, handpicking ethnic and occupational groups judged most likely to stay.
This experiment in designer immigration has made Winnipeg a hub of parka-clad diversity — a blue-collar town that gripes about the cold in Punjabi and Tagalog — and has defied the anti-immigrant backlash seen in much of the world.
Rancorous debates over immigration have erupted from Australia to Sweden, but there is no such thing in Canada as an anti-immigrant politician. Few nations take more immigrants per capita, and perhaps none with less fuss.
Is it the selectivity Canada shows? The services it provides? Even the Mad Cowz, a violent youth gang of African refugees, did nothing to curb local appetites for foreign workers.
“When I took this portfolio, I expected some of the backlash that’s occurred in other parts of the world,” said Jennifer Howard, Manitoba’s minister of immigration. “But I have yet to have people come up to me and say, ‘I want fewer immigrants.’ I hear, ‘How can we bring in more?’ ”
This steak-and-potatoes town now offers stocks of palm oil and pounded yams, four Filipino newspapers, a large Hindu Diwali festival, and a mandatory course on Canadian life from the grand to the granular. About 600 newcomers a month learn that the Canadian charter ensures “the right to life, liberty and security” and that employers like cover letters in Times New Roman font. (A gentle note to Filipinos: résumés with photographs, popular in Manila, are frowned on in Manitoba.)
“From the moment we touched down at the airport, it was love all the way,” said Olusegun Daodu, 34, a procurement professional who recently arrived from Nigeria to join relatives and marveled at the medical card that offers free care. “If we have any reason to go to the hospital now, we just walk in.”
“The license plates say ‘Friendly Manitoba,’ ” said his wife, Hannah.
“It’s true — really, really true,” Mr. Daodu said. “I had to ask my aunt, ‘Do they ever get angry here?’ ”
Canada has long sought immigrants to populate the world’s second largest land mass, but two developments in the 1960s shaped the modern age. One created a point system that favors the highly skilled. The other abolished provisions that screened out nonwhites. Millions of minorities followed, with Chinese, Indians and Filipinos in the lead.
Relative to its population, Canada takes more than twice as many legal immigrants as the United States. Why no hullabaloo?
With one-ninth of the United States’ population, Canada is keener for growth, and the point system helps persuade the public it is getting the newcomers it needs. The children of immigrants typically do well. The economic downturn has been mild. Plus the absence of large-scale illegal immigration removes a dominant source of the conflict in the United States.
“The big difference between Canada and the U.S is that we don’t border Mexico,” said Naomi Alboim, a former immigration official who teaches at Queens University in Ontario.
French and English from the start, Canada also has a more accommodating political culture — one that accepts more pluribus and demands less unum. That American complaint — “Why do I have to press 1 for English?” — baffles a country with a minister of multiculturalism.
Another force is in play: immigrant voting strength. About 20 percent of Canadians are foreign born (compared with 12.5 percent in the United States), and they are quicker to acquire citizenship and voting rights. “It’s political suicide to be against immigration,” said Leslie Seidle of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, a Montreal group.
Some stirrings of discontent can be found. The rapid growth of the “M.T.V.” cities has fueled complaints about congestion and housing costs. A foiled 2006 terrorist plot brought modest concern about radical Islam. And critics of the refugee system say it rewards false claims of persecution, leaving the country with an unlocked back door.
“There’s considerably more concern among our people than is reflected in our policies,” said Martin Collacott, who helped create the Center for Immigration Policy Reform, a new group that advocates less immigration.
Mr. Collacott argues high levels of immigration have run up the cost of the safety net, slowed economic growth and strained civic cohesion, but he agrees the issue has little force in politics. “There’s literally no one in Parliament willing to take up the cudgel,” he said.
The Manitoba program, started in 1998 at employers’ behest, has grown rapidly under both liberal and conservative governments. While the federal system favors those with college degrees, Manitoba takes the semi-skilled, like truck drivers, and focuses on people with local relatives in the hopes that they will stay. The newcomers can bring spouses and children and get a path to citizenship.
Most are required to bring savings, typically about $10,000, to finance the transition without government aid. While the province nominates people, the federal government does background checks and has the final say. Unlike many migrant streams, the new Manitobans have backgrounds that are strikingly middle class.
“Back home was good — not bad,” said Nishkam Virdi, 32, who makes $17 an hour at the Palliser furniture plant after moving from India, where his family owned a machine shop.
He said he was drawn less by wages than by the lure of health care and solid utilities. “The living standard is higher — the lighting, the water, the energy,” he said.
The program has attracted about 50,000 people over the last decade, and surveys show a majority stayed. Ms. Howard, the immigration minister, credits job placement and language programs, but many migrants cite the informal welcomes.
“Because we are from the third world, I thought they might think they are superior,” said Anne Simpao, a Filipino nurse in tiny St. Claude, who was approached by a stranger and offered dishes and a television set. “They call it friendly Manitoba, and it’s really true.”
One complaint throughout Canada is the difficulty many immigrants have in transferring professional credentials. Heredina Maranan, 45, a certified public accountant in Manila, has been stuck in a Manitoba factory job for a decade. She did not disguise her disappointment when relatives sought to follow her. “I did not encourage them,” she said. “I think I deserved better.”
They came anyway — two families totaling 14 people, drawn not just by jobs but the promise of good schools.
“Of course I wanted to come here,” said her nephew, Lordie Osena. “In the Philippines there are 60 children in one room.”
Every province except Quebec now runs a provincial program, each with different criteria, diluting the force of the federal point system. The Manitoba program has grown so rapidly, federal officials have imposed a numerical cap.
Arthur Mauro, a Winnipeg business leader, hails the Manitoba program but sees limited lessons for a country as demographically different as the United States. “There are very few states in the U.S. that say, ‘We need people,’ ” he said.
But Arthur DeFehr, chief executive officer of Palliser furniture, does see a lesson: choose migrants who fill local needs and give them a legal path.
With 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, he sees another opportunity for Manitoba. “I’m sure many of those people would make perfectly wonderful citizens of Canada,” he said. “I think we should go and get them.”
For Catholics, Interest in Exorcism Is Revived
The rite of exorcism, rendered gory by Hollywood and ridiculed by many modern believers, has largely fallen out of favor in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.
There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.
Now, American bishops are holding a conference on Friday and Saturday to prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.
“Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person.
“But it’s rare, it’s extraordinary, so the use of exorcism is also rare and extraordinary,” he said. “But we have to be prepared.”
The closed-door conference is being held in Baltimore before the annual fall meeting of the nation’s bishops. Some Catholic commentators said they were puzzled why the bishops would bother with exorcisms in a year when they are facing a full plate of crises — from parish and school closings, to polls showing the loss of one of every three white baptized members, to the sexual abuse scandal flaring up again.
But to R. Scott Appleby, a professor of American Catholic history at the University of Notre Dame, the bishops’ timing makes perfect sense.
“What they’re trying to do in restoring exorcisms,” said Dr. Appleby, a longtime observer of the bishops, “is to strengthen and enhance what seems to be lost in the church, which is the sense that the church is not like any other institution. It is supernatural, and the key players in that are the hierarchy and the priests who can be given the faculties of exorcism.
“It’s a strategy for saying: ‘We are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons.’ ”
Pope Benedict XVI has emphasized a return to traditional rituals and practices, and some observers said the bishops’ interest in exorcism was consistent with the direction set by the pope.
Exorcism is as old as Christianity itself. The New Testament has accounts of Jesus casting out demons, and it is cited in the Catholic Church’s catechism. But it is now far more popular in Europe, Africa and Latin America than in the United States.
Most exorcisms are not as dramatic as the bloody scenes in films. The ritual is based on a prayer in which the priest invokes the name of Jesus. The priest also uses holy water and a cross, and can alter the prayer depending on the reaction he gets from the possessed person, said Matt Baglio, a journalist in Rome who wrote the book “The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist” (Doubleday, 2009).
“The prayer comes from the power of Jesus’ name and the church. It doesn’t come from the power of the exorcist. The priest doesn’t have the magic power,” said Mr. Baglio, whose book has been made into a movie to be released in January, starring Anthony Hopkins.
There is plenty of cynicism among American Catholics — even among priests — about exorcism. Mr. Baglio noted that there are hucksters who prey on vulnerable believers, causing them physical or spiritual harm. As a result, he thought it was helpful that the church is making an effort to train more priests to perform the rite legitimately.
With so few priests who perform exorcisms, and the stigma around it, exorcists are not eager to be identified. Efforts to interview them on Friday were unsuccessful.
Bishop Paprocki said he was surprised at the turnout for the conference: 66 priests and 56 bishops. The goal is for each diocese to have someone who can at least screen requests for exorcisms.
Some of the classic signs of possession by a demon, Bishop Paprocki said, include speaking in a language the person has never learned; extraordinary shows of strength; a sudden aversion to spiritual things like holy water or the name of God; and severe sleeplessness, lack of appetite and cutting, scratching and biting the skin.
A person who claims to be possessed must be evaluated by doctors to rule out a mental or physical illness, according to Vatican guidelines issued in 1999, which superseded the previous guidelines, issued in 1614.
The Rev. Richard Vega, president of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils, an organization for American priests, said that when he first heard about the conference on exorcism, “My immediate reaction was to say, why?”
He said that he had not heard of any requests for exorcisms and that the topic had not come up in the notes of meetings from councils of priests in various dioceses.
The conference on exorcism comes at a time, he said, when the church is bringing back traditional practices. The Vatican has authorized the revival of the Latin Mass, and now a revised English translation of the liturgy, said to be closer to a direct translation from the Latin, is to be put in use in American parishes next year.
“People are talking about, are we taking two steps back?” Father Vega said. “My first reaction when I heard about the exorcism conference was, this is another of those trappings we’ve pulled out of the past.”
But he said that there could eventually be a rising demand for exorcism because of the influx of Hispanic and African Catholics to the United States. People from those cultures, he said, are more attuned to the experience of the supernatural.
Bishop Paprocki noted that according to Catholic belief, the Devil is a real and constant force who can intervene in people’s lives — though few of them will require an exorcism to handle it.
“The ordinary work of the Devil is temptation,” he said, “and the ordinary response is a good spiritual life, observing the sacraments and praying. The Devil doesn’t normally possess someone who is leading a good spiritual life.”
Cigarette Giants in Global Fight on Tighter Rules
As sales to developing nations become ever more important to giant tobacco companies, they are stepping up efforts around the world to fight tough restrictions on the marketing of cigarettes.
Companies like Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco are contesting limits on ads in Britain, bigger health warnings in South America and higher cigarette taxes in the Philippines and Mexico. They are also spending billions on lobbying and marketing campaigns in Africa and Asia, and in one case provided undisclosed financing for TV commercials in Australia.
The industry has ramped up its efforts in advance of a gathering in Uruguay this week of public health officials from 171 nations, who plan to shape guidelines to enforce a global anti-smoking treaty.
This year, Philip Morris International sued the government of Uruguay, saying its tobacco regulations were excessive. World Health Organization officials say the suit represents an effort by the industry to intimidate the country, as well as other nations attending the conference, that are considering strict marketing requirements for tobacco.
Uruguay’s groundbreaking law mandates that health warnings cover 80 percent of cigarette packages. It also limits each brand, like Marlboro, to one package design, so that alternate designs don’t mislead smokers into believing the products inside are less harmful.
The lawsuit against Uruguay, filed at a World Bank affiliate in Washington, seeks unspecified damages for lost profits.
“They’re using litigation to threaten low- and middle-income countries,” says Dr. Douglas Bettcher, head of the W.H.O.’s Tobacco Free Initiative. Uruguay’s gross domestic product is half the size of the company’s $66 billion in annual sales.
Peter Nixon, a vice president and spokesman for Philip Morris International, said the company was complying with every nation’s marketing laws while selling a lawful product for adult consumers.
He said the company’s lawsuits were intended to combat what it felt were “excessive” regulations, and to protect its trademark and commercial property rights.
Cigarette companies are aggressively recruiting new customers in developing nations, Dr. Bettcher said, to replace those who are quitting or dying in the United States and Europe, where smoking rates have fallen precipitously. Worldwide cigarette sales are rising 2 percent a year.
But the number of countries adopting tougher rules, as well as the global treaty, underscore the breadth of the battleground between tobacco and public health interests in legal and political arenas from Latin America to Africa to Asia.
The cigarette companies work together to fight some strict policies and go their separate ways on others. For instance, Philip Morris USA, a division of Altria Group, helped negotiate and supported the anti-smoking legislation passed by Congress last year and did not join a lawsuit filed by R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard and other tobacco companies against the Food and Drug Administration. So far, it is not protesting the agency’s new rules, proposed last week, requiring graphic images with health warnings on cigarette packs.
But Philip Morris International, the separate company spun out of Altria in 2008 to expand the company’s presence in foreign markets, has been especially aggressive in fighting new restrictions overseas.
It has not only sued Uruguay, but also Brazil, arguing that images the government wants to put on cigarette packages do not accurately depict the health effects of smoking and “vilify” tobacco companies. The pictures depict more grotesque health effects than the smaller labels recommended in the United States, including one showing a fetus with the warning that smoking can cause spontaneous abortion.
In Ireland and Norway, Philip Morris subsidiaries are suing over prohibitions on store displays.
In Australia, where the government announced a plan that would require cigarettes to be in plain brown or white packaging to make them less attractive to buyers, a Philip Morris official directed an opposition media campaign during the federal elections last summer, according to documents obtained by an Australian television program, and later obtained by The New York Times.
The $5 million campaign, purporting to come from small store owners, was also partly financed by British American and Imperial Tobacco. The Philip Morris official approved strategies, budgets, ad buys and media interviews, according to the documents.
Mr. Nixon, the spokesman, said Philip Morris made no secret of its financing of that effort. “We have helped them, not controlled them,” he said.
Mr. Nixon said Philip Morris agreed that smoking was harmful and supported “reasonable” regulations where none exist.
“The packages definitely need health warnings, but they’ve got to be a reasonable size,” he said. “We thought 50 percent was reasonable. Once you take it up to 80 percent, there’s no space for trademarks to be shown. We thought that was going too far.”
These days in courts around the world, the tobacco giants find themselves on the defensive far more than playing offense. The W.H.O. and its treaty encourage governments and individuals to take legal action against cigarette corporations, which have encountered growing numbers of lawsuits from smokers and health care systems in Brazil, Canada, Israel, Italy, Nigeria, Poland and Turkey.
But in other parts of the world, notably Indonesia, the fifth-largest cigarette market, which has little regulation, tobacco companies market their products in ways that are prohibited elsewhere. In Indonesia, cigarette ads run on TV and before movies; billboards dot the highways; companies appeal to children through concerts and sports events; cartoon characters adorn packages; and stores sell to children.
Officials in Indonesia say they depend on tobacco jobs, as well as revenue from excise taxes on cigarettes. Indonesia gets some $2.5 billion a year from Philip Morris International alone.
“In the U.S., they took down billboards, agreed not to sponsor music events, no longer use the Marlboro cowboy,” said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Washington-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “They now do all of those things overseas.”
The world’s second-biggest private cigarette maker, British American Tobacco, with $4.4 billion profits on $23 billion sales in the year ending June 30, is spending millions of dollars lobbying against anti-smoking health measures, like smoke-free air policies in the European Union.
A video on the company’s Web site says some of the proven methods of reducing smoking — like taxes and display bans — encourage a black market in cigarettes and that, in turn, would finance drug, sex and weapons traffickers and terrorists.
The six-minute video, in which actors play gangsters, one with an Eastern European accent, concludes, “Only the criminals benefit.”
The conference beginning on Monday in Punta del Este, Uruguay, will try to add specific terms to a public health treaty known as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which since 2003 has been ratified by 171 nations. It would eventually oblige its parties to impose tighter controls on tobacco ingredients, packaging and marketing, expand cessation programs and smoke-free spaces and raise taxes — proven tactics against smoking.
President George W. Bush signed the treaty in 2004 but did not send it to the Senate, where a two-thirds vote is needed for ratification. President Obama hopes to submit it to the Senate next year, a White House spokesman said on Thursday.
One recommendation drawing fire from tobacco farmers would either restrict or prohibit the use of popular additives, like licorice and chocolate, to blended tobacco products that account for more than half of worldwide sales.
The International Tobacco Growers’ Association says that could threaten the makers of burley tobacco, an air-cured leaf that has long been sweetened with additives, costing millions of farmers their jobs and devastating economies worldwide.
“We all know the real objective here is to eliminate tobacco consumption,” says Roger Quarles, a Kentucky grower and president of the association.
Catholics in Belgium Start Parishes of Their Own
Willy Delsaert is a retired railroad employee with dyslexia who practiced intensively before facing the suburban Don Bosco Catholic parish to perform the Sunday Mass rituals he grew up with.
“Who takes this bread and eats,” he murmured, cracking a communion wafer with his wife at his side, “declares a desire for a new world.”
With those words, Mr. Delsaert, 60, and his fellow parishioners are discreetly pioneering a grass-roots movement that defies centuries of Roman Catholic Church doctrine by worshiping and sharing communion without a priest.
Don Bosco is one of about a dozen alternative Catholic churches that have sprouted and grown in the last two years in Dutch-speaking regions of Belgium and the Netherlands. They are an uneasy reaction to a combination of forces: a shortage of priests, the closing of churches, dissatisfaction with Vatican appointments of conservative bishops and, most recently, dismay over cover-ups of sexual abuse by priests.
The churches are called ecclesias, the word derived from the Greek verb for “calling together.” Five were started last year in the Netherlands by Catholics who broke away from their existing parishes, and more are being planned, said Franck Ploum, who helped start an ecclesia in January in Breda, the Netherlands, and is organizing a network conference for the groups in the two countries.
At this sturdy brick church southwest of Brussels, men and women are trained as “conductors.” They preside over Masses and the landmarks of life: weddings and baptisms, funerals and last rites. Church members took charge more than a year ago when their pastor retired without a successor. In Belgium, about two-thirds of clergymen are over 55, and one-third older then 65.
“We are resisting a little bit like Gandhi,” said Johan Veys, a married former priest who performs baptisms and recruits newcomers for other tasks at Don Bosco. “Our intention is not to criticize, but to live correctly. We press onward quietly without a lot of noise. It’s important to have a community where people feel at home and can find peace and inspiration.”
Yet they appear to be on a collision course with the Vatican and the Catholic Church in Belgium. The Belgian church has been staggering from a sexual abuse scandal with 475 victims, and the resignation of the bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, who last April admitted to years of molesting a boy who turned out to be his nephew.
In the view of Rome, only ordained priests can celebrate Mass or preside over most sacraments like baptisms and marriage. “If there are persons or groups that do not observe these norms, the competent bishops — who know what really happens — have to see how to intervene and explain what is in order and out of order if someone belongs to the Catholic Church,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, said.
The primate of Belgium, Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard of Mechelen-Brussels, has already raised objections to the alternative services, calling them “unacceptable practices.” But he declined to respond to questions, maintaining a pledge to keep silent until December. He was engulfed in controversy this month after he criticized prosecution of elderly priests for pedophile acts as “vengeance” and described AIDS as a “sort of inherent justice” for promiscuous homosexual acts.
For some Catholics in the ecclesia movement and academics at the Catholic University of Louvain, Archbishop Léonard is emblematic of a remote church disconnected from a flock that yearns for more relevant rituals and active participation.
“Something is beginning to crack,” said the Rev. Gabriel Ringlet, a priest and former vice rector at the Catholic University of Louvain, which is considering dropping the “Catholic” from its name. “I think the Belgian Catholic Church is starting to feel something exceptional for the first time in 40 years. A lot of Catholics are waking up and speaking out.”
In Bruges, the city at the center of the church’s pedophilia scandal, an alternative Catholic group called De Lier tackles the church scandals in its weekly services. De Lier — The Lyre in Dutch — holds weekly services in a school chapel with a rotation of two men, two women and a priest. In recent services, church members read fragments from a Belgian church commission report that examined the plight of victims of child sex abuse. They expressed shame about a church that hushed reports of sexual abuse and used lawyerly language to avoid apology.
They have also simplified and personalized rituals, emphasizing the importance of community. Typically, they gather around a table with ceramic cups for wine and a round loaf of bread, and members are asked to recount a story of their joy and grief from the week before.
“We are looking for ways to live faith in a modern way,” said Karel Ceule, a Lier member. “If you look at the crisis today with Archbishop Léonard, he is a symbol of an old, conservative church. In Flanders, this doesn’t work anymore. We have reached a stage of history where we don’t accept that the priest has to be the go-between. We want to take charge of baptisms and communion.”
Some of the bishops in the Netherlands and Belgium have been quietly gathering information about the alternative churches, meeting with some of their members. Peter Rossel, a spokesman for Jozef De Kesel, the new bishop of Bruges, said the prelate was aware of the groups, but would not visit them anytime soon. “Now he has other priorities. He has many problems with the whole issue of sexual abuse,” Mr. Rossel said.
In the meantime, members of these groups say they make no secret of what they are doing, especially if changes come about because of the lack of priests. “If you ask the diocese officially about this, they say you may not do it,” said Bart Vanvolsem, a member of Don Bosco. “They say if there is no priest, there is no Mass. But Christ is here.”
In the early stages at Don Bosco, some people complained that services took too long. Others were distracted by the intimacy of gathering around a long wooden table. Some members didn’t want to lead a service. “I am still too traditional to do it myself,” Barbara Birkhölzer-Klein said. “What is happening here is totally natural, but I can’t do this yet.”
Mr. Delsaert had no such qualms. He donned a rainbow sash — the church’s symbol of a worship leader — and carried his notes. “It’s the second time,” he said. “For me, it’s very intense. Reading is very difficult for me because I have dyslexia.”
Almost 150 people gathered around him for a service organized by teenage members who picked a theme of peace and music from John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Mr. Delsaert delivered a homespun sermon that drew on his years as a railroad worker, urging parishioners to wage peace by talking to people in their daily lives. By bidding hello to a daily commuter, Mr. Delsaert said, “the man opened up to talk about train delays.”
“He seemed much happier,” Mr. Delsaert said.
During services, teenage members surrounded the table while a parish statement was read aloud: “We regret the pain caused by priests and those responsible in the church. We regret the damages to the victims, to the community and our church.”
Then a young girl lighted a rainbow-colored candle in the center of the table. She watched the flame flicker in memory of the 475 Belgian victims of sexual abuse.
On Nov. 4, Anderson Cooper did the country a favor. He expertly deconstructed on his CNN show the bogus rumor that President Obama’s trip to Asia would cost $200 million a day. This was an important “story.” It underscored just how far ahead of his time Mark Twain was when he said a century before the Internet, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” But it also showed that there is an antidote to malicious journalism — and that’s good journalism....
In case you missed it, a story circulated around the Web on the eve of President Obama’s trip that it would cost U.S. taxpayers $200 million a day — about $2 billion for the entire trip. Cooper said he felt impelled to check it out because the evening before he had had Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a Republican and Tea Party favorite, on his show and had asked her where exactly Republicans will cut the budget.
Instead of giving specifics, Bachmann used her airtime to inject a phony story into the mainstream. She answered: “I think we know that just within a day or so the president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He’ll be renting over 870 rooms in India, and these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending.”
The next night, Cooper explained that he felt compelled to trace that story back to its source, since someone had used his show to circulate it. His research, he said, found that it had originated from a quote by “an alleged Indian provincial official,” from the Indian state of Maharashtra, “reported by India’s Press Trust, their equivalent of our A.P. or Reuters. I say ‘alleged,’ provincial official,” Cooper added, “because we have no idea who this person is, no name was given.”
It is hard to get any more flimsy than a senior unnamed Indian official from Maharashtra talking about the cost of an Asian trip by the American president.
“It was an anonymous quote,” said Cooper. “Some reporter in India wrote this article with this figure in it. No proof was given; no follow-up reporting was done. Now you’d think if a member of Congress was going to use this figure as a fact, she would want to be pretty darn sure it was accurate, right? But there hasn’t been any follow-up reporting on this Indian story. The Indian article was picked up by The Drudge Report and other sites online, and it quickly made its way into conservative talk radio.”
Cooper then showed the following snippets: Rush Limbaugh talking about Obama’s trip: “In two days from now, he’ll be in India at $200 million a day.” Then Glenn Beck, on his radio show, saying: “Have you ever seen the president, ever seen the president go over for a vacation where you needed 34 warships, $2 billion — $2 billion, 34 warships. We are sending — he’s traveling with 3,000 people.” In Beck’s rendition, the president’s official state visit to India became “a vacation” accompanied by one-tenth of the U.S. Navy. Ditto the conservative radio talk-show host Michael Savage. He said, “$200 million? $200 million each day on security and other aspects of this incredible royalist visit; 3,000 people, including Secret Service agents.”
Cooper then added: “Again, no one really seemed to care to check the facts. For security reasons, the White House doesn’t comment on logistics of presidential trips, but they have made an exception this time." He then quoted Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, as saying, “I am not going to go into how much it costs to protect the president, [but this trip] is comparable to when President Clinton and when President Bush traveled abroad. This trip doesn’t cost $200 million a day.” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said: “I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd, this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy and some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier in support of the president’s trip to Asia. That’s just comical. Nothing close to that is being done.”
Cooper also pointed out that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the entire war effort in Afghanistan was costing about $190 million a day and that President Bill Clinton’s 1998 trip to Africa — with 1,300 people and of roughly similar duration, cost, according to the Government Accountability Office and adjusted for inflation, “about $5.2 million a day.”
When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it.
For Saudi Women, Biggest Challenge Is Getting to Play
After the 18-year-old Saudi equestrian Dalma Malhas won a bronze medal in show jumping at the first Youth Olympic Games in Singapore in August, she was singled out for praise by Jacques Rogge, chairman of the International Olympic Committee, in a news conference at the Games’ conclusion.
“This is indeed the first time that a Saudi woman is participating in an international event,” let alone winning a medal, Rogge said of Olympic events. Malhas’s achievement, he said, had made the I.O.C. “absolutely happy.”
The reaction in Malhas’s conservative Muslim homeland —where athletics for women are seen in some quarters as immodest, even immoral — has been far more complicated.
Physical activity of any kind is forbidden in Saudi Arabia’s state-run girls’ schools. Though gyms for women exist in major Saudi cities, they are usually unmarked, so that customers need not fear attracting attention.
Saudi Arabia does not permit women to represent it in international athletic competitions, and it is one of only three countries in the world that has yet to send women to the Olympic Games (the others are Qatar and Brunei). Though Saudi Arabia sent an official delegation of male athletes to Singapore for the Youth Olympics, Malhas — the daughter of an accomplished female show jumper, Arwa Mutabagani — had to enter on her own, at her own expense.
Now her bronze medal has placed her at the center of a growing controversy in the kingdom about what kinds of athletic activity, if any, are acceptable for Saudi girls and women.
The laws and customs that govern Saudi women’s lives are among the most restrictive anywhere. Public separation of the sexes is stringent. Saudi women may not drive or vote and must wear floor-length cloaks known as abayas and head scarves whenever they leave home. They may not appear in court.
Yet, in recent years, women’s issues have become a major battleground for liberals and conservatives. Saudi traditions regarding the rights and treatment of women have rarely, if ever, been so much in dispute. The issue of Saudi women in sports is a manifestation of this larger debate.
On July 31, the Saudi dissident Ali al-Ahmed, who directs the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, started a campaign called “No Women. No Play,” urging the I.O.C. to suspend Saudi Arabia from Olympic competition until it allowed female participation.
In a phone interview, Ahmed likened the position of Saudi women today to that of blacks in apartheid-era South Africa and asked why the I.O.C. had not suspended Saudi Arabia from the Games as it banned South Africa from 1964 through the end of apartheid in the early 1990s.
“Even more than political pressure, the expulsion of South Africa from the Olympics was one of the most effective tools for ending apartheid,” Ahmed said, without referring to the more prominent role accorded sports overall in South African society, or whether an Olympic ban thus had greater effect than it might on Saudi Arabia.
“The freedom to practice sports and to exercise is such a very basic issue,” Ahmed said. “It has to do with physical health. I think that once Saudi women are free to practice sports, that will open up other areas of discussion about their rights.”
The Olympic Charter states that “the practice of sport is a human right” and that “any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic movement.”
A spokeswoman for the I.O.C., Emmanuelle Moreau, suggested in an e-mail exchange that the I.O.C. had no intention of formally censuring countries that did not allow women to participate in the Olympics. She said the organization did not plan to give Saudi Arabia a deadline for women to participate, as it did with South Africa.
“The I.O.C. strives to ensure the Olympic Games and the Olympic movement are universal and nondiscriminatory,” Moreau said in an e-mail.
“National Olympic Committees are encouraged to uphold that spirit in their delegations. The I.O.C. does not give ultimatums nor deadlines but rather believes that a lot can be achieved through dialogue.”
Outside Olympic teams, there have been signs of change for Saudi sportswomen. In major cities, a handful of private basketball and soccer teams for women have sprung up. In 2008, Mutabagani was made a board member of Saudi Arabia’s Equestrian Federation, the first such post for a woman in Saudi sports.
Saudi newspaper columnists have argued that relaxing the prohibitions against physical exercise might help to stem exploding levels of obesity and osteoporosis among Saudi women.
Lina al-Maeena, who in 2003 founded Jeddah United, a women’s basketball team that has since grown into a fully-fledged sports training and management company, agrees.
“You have very high rates of diabetes, obesity and osteoporosis for women, a very high rate of depression,” she said. “You have this conservative segment here that’s using religion to oppose women’s sports. But that’s a very invalid argument.”
She hopes that pressure from the I.O.C. may help to break down the barriers to women’s athletic participation. “At the end of the day, the Olympic Charter does state that there shall be no discrimination based on gender, religion, or ethnicity. And Saudi Arabia is obviously not following the Olympic Charter.”
Liberal Saudis note that even Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammed, is reported to have enjoyed footraces against her husband and that conservative Muslim societies like Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have more open attitudes about women and sports.
Last year, the daily newspaper Al-Riyadh reported that a survey of 2,250 Saudis found that a mere 4 percent were opposed to gyms for girls and women.
But majority opinion counts for little in an absolute monarchy, where the king rules in concert with a Salafist religious establishment. Some of the most prominent clerics continue to oppose sports for women under all circumstances, arguing that sports will lead women to engage in behavior like wearing immodest clothing or leaving their homes unnecessarily.
Other clerics argue that sports are absolutely off limits only for virgins, who could become unmarriageable if they were to damage their hymens through athletic activity.
“Women should be housewives,” the Grand Mufti told the Saudi channel Al Eqtisadiah. “There is no need for them to engage in sports.”
Female Saudi athletes say they find it unproductive to debate views openly.
“I don’t want to provoke people,” Mutabagani said. “The conservative side always says, ‘No, you should be at home. You shouldn’t be traveling, you shouldn’t be competing in public.”’
Mutabagani wears a veil when she is representing Saudi Arabia overseas and said she always tries to emphasize, in interviews, the less controversial aspects of women’s athletics, like the importance of exercise for health. “I try to respect our culture,” she said. “You don’t want to create a negative opinion of women in sport.”
Maeena said that looking at women’s movements globally helped her stay optimistic.
“It’s not just in Saudi that sports for women are a political issue,” she said. “Up until 1972 with the Title 9, women in the U.S. didn’t really get equal rights in sports. And that’s, what — three decades ago? And it’s a 250-year old country.
“We’re only a 78-year-old country,” she continued. “When you gauge yourself from the historical perspective, you see that the process Saudi Arabia is going through is a very normal process that all societies have gone through in relation to different fields of endeavor for women.”
Small Cheesemaker Defies F.D.A. Over Recall
The foodies raved. The feds raided.
And now Kelli Estrella, a farmer and award-winning cheesemaker whose pastureland is tucked into a bend of the Wynoochee River here, has become a potent symbol in a contentious national debate over the safety of food produced by small farmers and how much the government should regulate it.
To her devotees, Ms. Estrella is a homespun diva of local food. With her husband and six adopted children from Liberia, she makes tasty artisan cheeses from the milk of her 36 cows and 40 goats and sells it at farmers’ markets.
Some even winds up on tables at fancy restaurants in Manhattan and Los Angeles.
But to the federal government, Ms. Estrella is a defiant businesswoman unable to keep dangerous bacteria out of her products. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration moved to shut down her business, Estrella Family Creamery, after tests found listeria in some of her cheese and she refused to agree to a broad recall of her products.
Although no illnesses have been linked to Ms. Estrella’s cheese, listeria is a sometimes deadly bacteria that is especially hazardous for the very young and the very old. Pregnant women who become infected can have miscarriages or stillbirths.
Issues of food safety and small food producers were at the fore in Washington, D.C., this week as senators struck a deal that would exempt small producers from some of the rules that would be imposed by a sweeping food safety bill. A vote is expected after Thanksgiving on the long-awaited legislation.
“They really need to go after the industrial producers,” said Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, who pushed for the exemption. “The level of risk is far less with the little guy than it is with the big guy.”
There is fuel for all sides in Ms. Estrella’s predicament: it shows that even food from a revered artisan producer can pose risks, while demonstrating the pitfalls for regulators who may be viewed as heavy-handed.
Ms. Estrella’s case has drawn visceral reaction from foodies because the allegations threaten a core belief of what has come to be known as the locavore movement: that food from small, local producers is inherently better and safer than food made by large, faceless corporations. Her supporters cast her as a David fighting a two-headed Goliath of Big Food and Big Government.
“She’s an incredible craftsperson and one of the best cheesemakers in the country,” said Tia Keenan, a New York restaurant consultant who specializes in cheese. “The laws regarding food safety are really meant to regulate large-scale, corporate, industrial food production, and small food producers really suffer under those guidelines.”
Federal and state regulators, meanwhile, say they have very real concerns about the safety of cheese, especially softer varieties like brie and mozzarella that are more likely to harbor listeria. The F.D.A. began in April to test soft-cheese makers for listeria, visiting 102 facilities, large and small, and found the bacteria in 24 of them. While the list of facilities where listeria was found included some large factories, more than half of the makers were artisanal producers.
Regulators say that safety, not size, is what’s important.
“When you’ve got people that make good cheese, you want them to be successful,” said Claudia Coles, the food safety program manager for the Washington State Department of Agriculture. “But our first premise is, we don’t want people marketing an unsafe product.”
William Marler, a Seattle food safety lawyer, said it was clear that regulators tried to work with Ms. Estrella and that he was puzzled by the attitude that Ms. Estrella’s supporters appear to have toward the F.D.A. “I just don’t know how they make the leap from the government trying to do the right thing for public health to ‘they’re food Nazis in the pocket of big agribusiness.’ ”
At least nine artisan cheesemakers have had recalls this year. Most involved listeria in soft cheeses, but this month, a California cheesemaker, Bravo Farms, recalled a gouda, a semi-hard cheese, from Costco stores after it was linked to an E. coli outbreak that sickened 37 people.
Artisan cheese is made by hand in small batches, often using raw milk that is not pasteurized to kill bacteria (raw-milk cheeses must be aged 60 days to make them safer). In recent years, the number of artisan cheesemakers has grown rapidly. Washington State now has 34, up from about 18 in 2005. Vermont, another hot spot, has 48, up from 27 in 2005.
Ms. Estrella’s problems began in February, when state tests found listeria in her cheese and throughout the farm building where she makes and ages it. The bacteria was even in a humidifier that officials said blew it around the facility. Ms. Estrella recalled some cheese and did a vigorous cleaning and renovation.
But in August, F.D.A. inspectors again found the bacteria in her facility and cheese. In early September, they asked her to recall all of her products.
Ms. Estrella said no, a rare act of defiance by any food maker. She argued that the F.D.A. had found listeria only in her soft cheeses and that hundreds of wheels of hard cheese were safe. She estimated the value of the cheese the government wanted destroyed at more than $100,000.
Last month, the F.D.A., which does not have the power to order a recall (the food safety bill in the Senate would give it that authority), went to court, saying the “persistent presence” of listeria meant all of Ms. Estrella’s cheese should be considered contaminated. In response, a federal judge sent marshals to effectively impound the cheese, preventing her from doing business.
The F.D.A. declined to discuss Ms. Estrella’s case because of the litigation. But a spokeswoman, Siobhan DeLancey, said, “When we find a pathogen in a facility, especially one that can kill or cause miscarriages, we’re going to take action.”
Ms. Estrella plans to fight back in court.
“Where’s the balance here?” she said on a recent afternoon as she stood in one of the aging rooms on her farm, surrounded by wheels of cheese she is forbidden to sell. “Let’s work together. Let’s not just put cheesemakers out of business.”
She says she believes that the F.D.A.’s crackdown is part of a larger campaign against raw milk, and she is fighting for her customers’ right to eat whatever they choose. “I don’t think this issue is about bacteria and it’s not about cheese,” she said. “I think that we’re losing our freedom.”
The F.D.A. said it was not targeting artisan cheesemakers or those who use raw milk, and its listeria testing had included producers across the spectrum.
While cheesemakers acknowledge the need for good sanitation, some supporters question the agency’s approach.
“If the F.D.A. wanted to shut down the U.S. artisan cheese industry, all they’d have to do is do this environmental surveillance and the odds of finding a pathogen would be pretty great,” said Catherine W. Donnelly, co-director of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese of the University of Vermont, referring to the listeria testing at cheese plants. “Is our role to shut these places down or help them?”
Ms. Estrella has received support from loyal customers, retailers and other artisan producers. Fueling that support is the fact that no cases of illness have been linked to her cheese.
Dr. Anthony Marfin, Washington State’s epidemiologist for communicable diseases, said it was possible the contamination was relatively low, so no severe illnesses were reported. Mild listeria infections can cause flulike symptoms or nausea.
But he said that once the organism was in a food, it could grow to harmful concentrations.
Kurt Beecher Dammeier, owner of Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, an artisan cheesemaker and retailer in Seattle, said the F.D.A. needed to work harder to understand artisans like Ms. Estrella. “The F.D.A. comes from an industrial, zero-defect, highly processed, repeatable perspective, and she comes from a more ancient time of creating with what she gets,” he said. “I’m not sure they can really even have a conversation.”
I.R.S. Sits on Data Pointing to Missing Children
For parents of missing children, any scrap of information that could lead to an abductor is precious.
Three years into an excruciating search for her abducted son, Susan Lau got such a tip. Her estranged husband, who had absconded with their 9-year-old from Brooklyn, had apparently filed a tax return claiming the boy as an exemption.
Investigators moved quickly to seek the address where his tax refund had been mailed. But the Internal Revenue Service was not forthcoming.
“They just basically said forget about it,” said Julianne Sylva, a child abduction investigator who is now deputy district attorney in Santa Clara County, Calif.
The government, which by its own admission has data that could be helpful in tracking down the thousands of missing children in the United States, says that taxpayer privacy laws severely restrict the release of information from tax returns. “We will do whatever we can within the confines of the law to make it easier for law enforcement to find abducted children,” said Michelle Eldridge, an I.R.S. spokeswoman.
The privacy laws, enacted a generation ago to prevent Watergate-era abuses of confidential taxpayer information, have specific exceptions allowing the I.R.S. to turn over information in child support cases and to help federal agencies determine whether an applicant qualifies for income-based federal benefits.
But because of guidelines in the handling of criminal cases, there are several obstacles for parents and investigators pursuing a child abductor — even when the taxpayer in question is a fugitive and the subject of a felony warrant.
“It’s one of those areas where you would hope that common sense would prevail,” said Ernie Allen, president and chief executive of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “We are talking about people who are fugitives, who have criminal warrants against them. And children who are at risk.”
About 200,000 family abductions are reported each year in the United States, most of which stem from custody disputes between estranged spouses. About 12,000 last longer than six months, according to Justice Department statistics, and involve parental abductors who assume false identities and travel the country to escape detection.
But, counterintuitive as it may seem, a significant number file one of bureaucracy’s most invasive documents, a federal tax return. A study released by the Treasury Department in 2007 examined the Social Security numbers of 1,700 missing children and the relatives suspected of abducting them, and found that more than a third had been used in tax returns filed after the abductions took place.
Criminologists say it is unclear what motivates a child abductor to file a tax return: confusion, financial desperation for a refund or an attempt to avoid compounding their criminal problems by failing to pay taxes. Whatever the reason, the details in a return on an abductor’s whereabouts, work history and mailing address can be crucial to detectives searching for a missing child.
“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” said Harold Copus, a retired F.B.I. agent who investigated missing child cases, of why abductors provide such information. “But if they were thinking clearly, they wouldn’t have abducted their child in the first place.”
The law forbids the I.R.S. from turning over data from tax returns unless a parental abduction is being investigated as a federal crime and a United States district judge orders the information released. But the vast majority of parental abduction cases are investigated by state and local prosecutors, not as federal crimes, say investigators and missing children’s advocates. Even when the F.B.I. does intercede in parental abduction cases, requests for I.R.S. data are rarely granted.
When the Treasury Department study identified hundreds of suspected abductors who had filed tax returns, for instance, a federal judge in Virginia refused to issue an order authorizing the I.R.S. to turn over their addresses to investigators. The judge, Leonie M. Brinkema, declined to discuss her decision.
Advocates for missing children say that federal judges often argue that parental abductions are better suited to family court than criminal court.
“There’s this sense that because the child is with at least one of their parents, it’s not really a problem,” said Abby Potash, director of Team Hope, which counsels parents who are searching for a missing child. Ms. Potash’s son was abducted by a relative and kept for eight months before he was recovered. “But when you’re the parent who’s left behind, it is devastating. You’re being robbed of your son or daughter’s childhood.”
In Ms. Lau’s case, her search for her missing son dragged on for two years after the I.R.S. refused investigators’ request for her ex-husband’s tax return. She actually got the tip from the I.R.S., which disallowed her request to claim the boy on her own tax return because someone else had. The boy was eventually found in Utah, after his photo appeared in a flier distributed by missing children’s groups, and he was reunited with his mother at age 15 — five years after they were separated.
I.R.S. officials are quick to point out that they have worked closely with missing children’s advocates in some areas. The I.R.S.’s “Picture Them Home” program has included photos of thousands of missing children with forms mailed to millions of taxpayers since 2001. More than 80 children were recovered with the help of that program.
Still, attempts to change the law to give the tax agency more latitude have sputtered over the last decade. Dennis DeConcini, a former Democratic senator from Arizona, lobbied for the change in 2004 on behalf of a child advocacy group, but said that it never gained traction because some members of Congress feared that any release of I.R.S. data could lead to a gradual erosion of taxpayer privacy. In recent years, much of the legislation involving missing children has focused on international abductions.
One problem missing children’s advocates have wrestled with in proposing legislation is determining how much information the I.R.S. should be asked to release from a suspected abductor’s tax return. Should disclosure be required only if a child’s Social Security number is listed on a return? Should child abduction investigators be given only the address where a tax return was mailed? Or the location of an employer who has withheld taxes on a suspected abductor?
Griselda Gonzalez, who has not seen her children since 2007, holds fleeting hope that some type of information might reunite her family. Diego and Tammy Flores were just 2 and 3 years old when their father took them from their home in Victorville, Calif., for a weeklong visit and never returned. After Ms. Gonzalez reported their disappearance, a felony warrant for kidnapping was issued for the father, Francisco Flores. His financial records suggest he meticulously planned his actions for months — withdrawing money from various accounts and taking out a second mortgage — so Ms. Gonzalez doubts he would claim the children as dependents on a tax return.
But it gnaws at her that some federal laws seemed more concerned with the privacy of a fugitive than the safety of children.
“When your kids are taken from you, the hardest part is at night, thinking about them going to sleep,” she said. “You wonder who’s tucking them in, who will hug them if they have a bad dream or taking them to the bathroom if they wake up. And you ask yourself whether you’ve done everything possible to find them.”
“It would be good to know that you tried everything,” she said.
Missing children’s advocates see the I.R.S. data as a potentially powerful resource.
“There are hundreds of cases this could help solve,” said Cindy Rudometkin of the Polly Klaas Foundation. “And even if it helped solve one case — imagine if that child returned home was yours.”
One on the avoidance of the term "rape" for children who clearly WERE raped.
On the trend of diagnosing children with bipolar disorder - worth reading
A 1960s parody of commercials
The Pope has more or less approved condom use by male prostitutes to prevent the spread of AIDS. This is one of those situations where, if you can get inside the logic that leads to "condoms for male hookers = yes, condoms for married couples = no" it makes internal sense. I guess.
On good airport security
Canada wants more immigrants.
As waves of immigrants from the developing world remade Canada a decade ago, the famously friendly people of Manitoba could not contain their pique.
What irked them was not the Babel of tongues, the billions spent on health care and social services, or the explosion of ethnic identities. The rub was the newcomers’ preference for “M.T.V.” — Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver — over the humble prairie province north of North Dakota, which coveted workers and population growth.
Demanding “our fair share,” Manitobans did something hard to imagine in American politics, where concern over illegal immigrants dominates public debate and states seek more power to keep them out. In Canada, which has little illegal immigration, Manitoba won new power to bring foreigners in, handpicking ethnic and occupational groups judged most likely to stay.
This experiment in designer immigration has made Winnipeg a hub of parka-clad diversity — a blue-collar town that gripes about the cold in Punjabi and Tagalog — and has defied the anti-immigrant backlash seen in much of the world.
Rancorous debates over immigration have erupted from Australia to Sweden, but there is no such thing in Canada as an anti-immigrant politician. Few nations take more immigrants per capita, and perhaps none with less fuss.
Is it the selectivity Canada shows? The services it provides? Even the Mad Cowz, a violent youth gang of African refugees, did nothing to curb local appetites for foreign workers.
“When I took this portfolio, I expected some of the backlash that’s occurred in other parts of the world,” said Jennifer Howard, Manitoba’s minister of immigration. “But I have yet to have people come up to me and say, ‘I want fewer immigrants.’ I hear, ‘How can we bring in more?’ ”
This steak-and-potatoes town now offers stocks of palm oil and pounded yams, four Filipino newspapers, a large Hindu Diwali festival, and a mandatory course on Canadian life from the grand to the granular. About 600 newcomers a month learn that the Canadian charter ensures “the right to life, liberty and security” and that employers like cover letters in Times New Roman font. (A gentle note to Filipinos: résumés with photographs, popular in Manila, are frowned on in Manitoba.)
“From the moment we touched down at the airport, it was love all the way,” said Olusegun Daodu, 34, a procurement professional who recently arrived from Nigeria to join relatives and marveled at the medical card that offers free care. “If we have any reason to go to the hospital now, we just walk in.”
“The license plates say ‘Friendly Manitoba,’ ” said his wife, Hannah.
“It’s true — really, really true,” Mr. Daodu said. “I had to ask my aunt, ‘Do they ever get angry here?’ ”
Canada has long sought immigrants to populate the world’s second largest land mass, but two developments in the 1960s shaped the modern age. One created a point system that favors the highly skilled. The other abolished provisions that screened out nonwhites. Millions of minorities followed, with Chinese, Indians and Filipinos in the lead.
Relative to its population, Canada takes more than twice as many legal immigrants as the United States. Why no hullabaloo?
With one-ninth of the United States’ population, Canada is keener for growth, and the point system helps persuade the public it is getting the newcomers it needs. The children of immigrants typically do well. The economic downturn has been mild. Plus the absence of large-scale illegal immigration removes a dominant source of the conflict in the United States.
“The big difference between Canada and the U.S is that we don’t border Mexico,” said Naomi Alboim, a former immigration official who teaches at Queens University in Ontario.
French and English from the start, Canada also has a more accommodating political culture — one that accepts more pluribus and demands less unum. That American complaint — “Why do I have to press 1 for English?” — baffles a country with a minister of multiculturalism.
Another force is in play: immigrant voting strength. About 20 percent of Canadians are foreign born (compared with 12.5 percent in the United States), and they are quicker to acquire citizenship and voting rights. “It’s political suicide to be against immigration,” said Leslie Seidle of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, a Montreal group.
Some stirrings of discontent can be found. The rapid growth of the “M.T.V.” cities has fueled complaints about congestion and housing costs. A foiled 2006 terrorist plot brought modest concern about radical Islam. And critics of the refugee system say it rewards false claims of persecution, leaving the country with an unlocked back door.
“There’s considerably more concern among our people than is reflected in our policies,” said Martin Collacott, who helped create the Center for Immigration Policy Reform, a new group that advocates less immigration.
Mr. Collacott argues high levels of immigration have run up the cost of the safety net, slowed economic growth and strained civic cohesion, but he agrees the issue has little force in politics. “There’s literally no one in Parliament willing to take up the cudgel,” he said.
The Manitoba program, started in 1998 at employers’ behest, has grown rapidly under both liberal and conservative governments. While the federal system favors those with college degrees, Manitoba takes the semi-skilled, like truck drivers, and focuses on people with local relatives in the hopes that they will stay. The newcomers can bring spouses and children and get a path to citizenship.
Most are required to bring savings, typically about $10,000, to finance the transition without government aid. While the province nominates people, the federal government does background checks and has the final say. Unlike many migrant streams, the new Manitobans have backgrounds that are strikingly middle class.
“Back home was good — not bad,” said Nishkam Virdi, 32, who makes $17 an hour at the Palliser furniture plant after moving from India, where his family owned a machine shop.
He said he was drawn less by wages than by the lure of health care and solid utilities. “The living standard is higher — the lighting, the water, the energy,” he said.
The program has attracted about 50,000 people over the last decade, and surveys show a majority stayed. Ms. Howard, the immigration minister, credits job placement and language programs, but many migrants cite the informal welcomes.
“Because we are from the third world, I thought they might think they are superior,” said Anne Simpao, a Filipino nurse in tiny St. Claude, who was approached by a stranger and offered dishes and a television set. “They call it friendly Manitoba, and it’s really true.”
One complaint throughout Canada is the difficulty many immigrants have in transferring professional credentials. Heredina Maranan, 45, a certified public accountant in Manila, has been stuck in a Manitoba factory job for a decade. She did not disguise her disappointment when relatives sought to follow her. “I did not encourage them,” she said. “I think I deserved better.”
They came anyway — two families totaling 14 people, drawn not just by jobs but the promise of good schools.
“Of course I wanted to come here,” said her nephew, Lordie Osena. “In the Philippines there are 60 children in one room.”
Every province except Quebec now runs a provincial program, each with different criteria, diluting the force of the federal point system. The Manitoba program has grown so rapidly, federal officials have imposed a numerical cap.
Arthur Mauro, a Winnipeg business leader, hails the Manitoba program but sees limited lessons for a country as demographically different as the United States. “There are very few states in the U.S. that say, ‘We need people,’ ” he said.
But Arthur DeFehr, chief executive officer of Palliser furniture, does see a lesson: choose migrants who fill local needs and give them a legal path.
With 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, he sees another opportunity for Manitoba. “I’m sure many of those people would make perfectly wonderful citizens of Canada,” he said. “I think we should go and get them.”
For Catholics, Interest in Exorcism Is Revived
The rite of exorcism, rendered gory by Hollywood and ridiculed by many modern believers, has largely fallen out of favor in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.
There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.
Now, American bishops are holding a conference on Friday and Saturday to prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.
“Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person.
“But it’s rare, it’s extraordinary, so the use of exorcism is also rare and extraordinary,” he said. “But we have to be prepared.”
The closed-door conference is being held in Baltimore before the annual fall meeting of the nation’s bishops. Some Catholic commentators said they were puzzled why the bishops would bother with exorcisms in a year when they are facing a full plate of crises — from parish and school closings, to polls showing the loss of one of every three white baptized members, to the sexual abuse scandal flaring up again.
But to R. Scott Appleby, a professor of American Catholic history at the University of Notre Dame, the bishops’ timing makes perfect sense.
“What they’re trying to do in restoring exorcisms,” said Dr. Appleby, a longtime observer of the bishops, “is to strengthen and enhance what seems to be lost in the church, which is the sense that the church is not like any other institution. It is supernatural, and the key players in that are the hierarchy and the priests who can be given the faculties of exorcism.
“It’s a strategy for saying: ‘We are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons.’ ”
Pope Benedict XVI has emphasized a return to traditional rituals and practices, and some observers said the bishops’ interest in exorcism was consistent with the direction set by the pope.
Exorcism is as old as Christianity itself. The New Testament has accounts of Jesus casting out demons, and it is cited in the Catholic Church’s catechism. But it is now far more popular in Europe, Africa and Latin America than in the United States.
Most exorcisms are not as dramatic as the bloody scenes in films. The ritual is based on a prayer in which the priest invokes the name of Jesus. The priest also uses holy water and a cross, and can alter the prayer depending on the reaction he gets from the possessed person, said Matt Baglio, a journalist in Rome who wrote the book “The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist” (Doubleday, 2009).
“The prayer comes from the power of Jesus’ name and the church. It doesn’t come from the power of the exorcist. The priest doesn’t have the magic power,” said Mr. Baglio, whose book has been made into a movie to be released in January, starring Anthony Hopkins.
There is plenty of cynicism among American Catholics — even among priests — about exorcism. Mr. Baglio noted that there are hucksters who prey on vulnerable believers, causing them physical or spiritual harm. As a result, he thought it was helpful that the church is making an effort to train more priests to perform the rite legitimately.
With so few priests who perform exorcisms, and the stigma around it, exorcists are not eager to be identified. Efforts to interview them on Friday were unsuccessful.
Bishop Paprocki said he was surprised at the turnout for the conference: 66 priests and 56 bishops. The goal is for each diocese to have someone who can at least screen requests for exorcisms.
Some of the classic signs of possession by a demon, Bishop Paprocki said, include speaking in a language the person has never learned; extraordinary shows of strength; a sudden aversion to spiritual things like holy water or the name of God; and severe sleeplessness, lack of appetite and cutting, scratching and biting the skin.
A person who claims to be possessed must be evaluated by doctors to rule out a mental or physical illness, according to Vatican guidelines issued in 1999, which superseded the previous guidelines, issued in 1614.
The Rev. Richard Vega, president of the National Federation of Priests’ Councils, an organization for American priests, said that when he first heard about the conference on exorcism, “My immediate reaction was to say, why?”
He said that he had not heard of any requests for exorcisms and that the topic had not come up in the notes of meetings from councils of priests in various dioceses.
The conference on exorcism comes at a time, he said, when the church is bringing back traditional practices. The Vatican has authorized the revival of the Latin Mass, and now a revised English translation of the liturgy, said to be closer to a direct translation from the Latin, is to be put in use in American parishes next year.
“People are talking about, are we taking two steps back?” Father Vega said. “My first reaction when I heard about the exorcism conference was, this is another of those trappings we’ve pulled out of the past.”
But he said that there could eventually be a rising demand for exorcism because of the influx of Hispanic and African Catholics to the United States. People from those cultures, he said, are more attuned to the experience of the supernatural.
Bishop Paprocki noted that according to Catholic belief, the Devil is a real and constant force who can intervene in people’s lives — though few of them will require an exorcism to handle it.
“The ordinary work of the Devil is temptation,” he said, “and the ordinary response is a good spiritual life, observing the sacraments and praying. The Devil doesn’t normally possess someone who is leading a good spiritual life.”
Cigarette Giants in Global Fight on Tighter Rules
As sales to developing nations become ever more important to giant tobacco companies, they are stepping up efforts around the world to fight tough restrictions on the marketing of cigarettes.
Companies like Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco are contesting limits on ads in Britain, bigger health warnings in South America and higher cigarette taxes in the Philippines and Mexico. They are also spending billions on lobbying and marketing campaigns in Africa and Asia, and in one case provided undisclosed financing for TV commercials in Australia.
The industry has ramped up its efforts in advance of a gathering in Uruguay this week of public health officials from 171 nations, who plan to shape guidelines to enforce a global anti-smoking treaty.
This year, Philip Morris International sued the government of Uruguay, saying its tobacco regulations were excessive. World Health Organization officials say the suit represents an effort by the industry to intimidate the country, as well as other nations attending the conference, that are considering strict marketing requirements for tobacco.
Uruguay’s groundbreaking law mandates that health warnings cover 80 percent of cigarette packages. It also limits each brand, like Marlboro, to one package design, so that alternate designs don’t mislead smokers into believing the products inside are less harmful.
The lawsuit against Uruguay, filed at a World Bank affiliate in Washington, seeks unspecified damages for lost profits.
“They’re using litigation to threaten low- and middle-income countries,” says Dr. Douglas Bettcher, head of the W.H.O.’s Tobacco Free Initiative. Uruguay’s gross domestic product is half the size of the company’s $66 billion in annual sales.
Peter Nixon, a vice president and spokesman for Philip Morris International, said the company was complying with every nation’s marketing laws while selling a lawful product for adult consumers.
He said the company’s lawsuits were intended to combat what it felt were “excessive” regulations, and to protect its trademark and commercial property rights.
Cigarette companies are aggressively recruiting new customers in developing nations, Dr. Bettcher said, to replace those who are quitting or dying in the United States and Europe, where smoking rates have fallen precipitously. Worldwide cigarette sales are rising 2 percent a year.
But the number of countries adopting tougher rules, as well as the global treaty, underscore the breadth of the battleground between tobacco and public health interests in legal and political arenas from Latin America to Africa to Asia.
The cigarette companies work together to fight some strict policies and go their separate ways on others. For instance, Philip Morris USA, a division of Altria Group, helped negotiate and supported the anti-smoking legislation passed by Congress last year and did not join a lawsuit filed by R. J. Reynolds, Lorillard and other tobacco companies against the Food and Drug Administration. So far, it is not protesting the agency’s new rules, proposed last week, requiring graphic images with health warnings on cigarette packs.
But Philip Morris International, the separate company spun out of Altria in 2008 to expand the company’s presence in foreign markets, has been especially aggressive in fighting new restrictions overseas.
It has not only sued Uruguay, but also Brazil, arguing that images the government wants to put on cigarette packages do not accurately depict the health effects of smoking and “vilify” tobacco companies. The pictures depict more grotesque health effects than the smaller labels recommended in the United States, including one showing a fetus with the warning that smoking can cause spontaneous abortion.
In Ireland and Norway, Philip Morris subsidiaries are suing over prohibitions on store displays.
In Australia, where the government announced a plan that would require cigarettes to be in plain brown or white packaging to make them less attractive to buyers, a Philip Morris official directed an opposition media campaign during the federal elections last summer, according to documents obtained by an Australian television program, and later obtained by The New York Times.
The $5 million campaign, purporting to come from small store owners, was also partly financed by British American and Imperial Tobacco. The Philip Morris official approved strategies, budgets, ad buys and media interviews, according to the documents.
Mr. Nixon, the spokesman, said Philip Morris made no secret of its financing of that effort. “We have helped them, not controlled them,” he said.
Mr. Nixon said Philip Morris agreed that smoking was harmful and supported “reasonable” regulations where none exist.
“The packages definitely need health warnings, but they’ve got to be a reasonable size,” he said. “We thought 50 percent was reasonable. Once you take it up to 80 percent, there’s no space for trademarks to be shown. We thought that was going too far.”
These days in courts around the world, the tobacco giants find themselves on the defensive far more than playing offense. The W.H.O. and its treaty encourage governments and individuals to take legal action against cigarette corporations, which have encountered growing numbers of lawsuits from smokers and health care systems in Brazil, Canada, Israel, Italy, Nigeria, Poland and Turkey.
But in other parts of the world, notably Indonesia, the fifth-largest cigarette market, which has little regulation, tobacco companies market their products in ways that are prohibited elsewhere. In Indonesia, cigarette ads run on TV and before movies; billboards dot the highways; companies appeal to children through concerts and sports events; cartoon characters adorn packages; and stores sell to children.
Officials in Indonesia say they depend on tobacco jobs, as well as revenue from excise taxes on cigarettes. Indonesia gets some $2.5 billion a year from Philip Morris International alone.
“In the U.S., they took down billboards, agreed not to sponsor music events, no longer use the Marlboro cowboy,” said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Washington-based Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “They now do all of those things overseas.”
The world’s second-biggest private cigarette maker, British American Tobacco, with $4.4 billion profits on $23 billion sales in the year ending June 30, is spending millions of dollars lobbying against anti-smoking health measures, like smoke-free air policies in the European Union.
A video on the company’s Web site says some of the proven methods of reducing smoking — like taxes and display bans — encourage a black market in cigarettes and that, in turn, would finance drug, sex and weapons traffickers and terrorists.
The six-minute video, in which actors play gangsters, one with an Eastern European accent, concludes, “Only the criminals benefit.”
The conference beginning on Monday in Punta del Este, Uruguay, will try to add specific terms to a public health treaty known as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which since 2003 has been ratified by 171 nations. It would eventually oblige its parties to impose tighter controls on tobacco ingredients, packaging and marketing, expand cessation programs and smoke-free spaces and raise taxes — proven tactics against smoking.
President George W. Bush signed the treaty in 2004 but did not send it to the Senate, where a two-thirds vote is needed for ratification. President Obama hopes to submit it to the Senate next year, a White House spokesman said on Thursday.
One recommendation drawing fire from tobacco farmers would either restrict or prohibit the use of popular additives, like licorice and chocolate, to blended tobacco products that account for more than half of worldwide sales.
The International Tobacco Growers’ Association says that could threaten the makers of burley tobacco, an air-cured leaf that has long been sweetened with additives, costing millions of farmers their jobs and devastating economies worldwide.
“We all know the real objective here is to eliminate tobacco consumption,” says Roger Quarles, a Kentucky grower and president of the association.
Catholics in Belgium Start Parishes of Their Own
Willy Delsaert is a retired railroad employee with dyslexia who practiced intensively before facing the suburban Don Bosco Catholic parish to perform the Sunday Mass rituals he grew up with.
“Who takes this bread and eats,” he murmured, cracking a communion wafer with his wife at his side, “declares a desire for a new world.”
With those words, Mr. Delsaert, 60, and his fellow parishioners are discreetly pioneering a grass-roots movement that defies centuries of Roman Catholic Church doctrine by worshiping and sharing communion without a priest.
Don Bosco is one of about a dozen alternative Catholic churches that have sprouted and grown in the last two years in Dutch-speaking regions of Belgium and the Netherlands. They are an uneasy reaction to a combination of forces: a shortage of priests, the closing of churches, dissatisfaction with Vatican appointments of conservative bishops and, most recently, dismay over cover-ups of sexual abuse by priests.
The churches are called ecclesias, the word derived from the Greek verb for “calling together.” Five were started last year in the Netherlands by Catholics who broke away from their existing parishes, and more are being planned, said Franck Ploum, who helped start an ecclesia in January in Breda, the Netherlands, and is organizing a network conference for the groups in the two countries.
At this sturdy brick church southwest of Brussels, men and women are trained as “conductors.” They preside over Masses and the landmarks of life: weddings and baptisms, funerals and last rites. Church members took charge more than a year ago when their pastor retired without a successor. In Belgium, about two-thirds of clergymen are over 55, and one-third older then 65.
“We are resisting a little bit like Gandhi,” said Johan Veys, a married former priest who performs baptisms and recruits newcomers for other tasks at Don Bosco. “Our intention is not to criticize, but to live correctly. We press onward quietly without a lot of noise. It’s important to have a community where people feel at home and can find peace and inspiration.”
Yet they appear to be on a collision course with the Vatican and the Catholic Church in Belgium. The Belgian church has been staggering from a sexual abuse scandal with 475 victims, and the resignation of the bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, who last April admitted to years of molesting a boy who turned out to be his nephew.
In the view of Rome, only ordained priests can celebrate Mass or preside over most sacraments like baptisms and marriage. “If there are persons or groups that do not observe these norms, the competent bishops — who know what really happens — have to see how to intervene and explain what is in order and out of order if someone belongs to the Catholic Church,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, said.
The primate of Belgium, Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard of Mechelen-Brussels, has already raised objections to the alternative services, calling them “unacceptable practices.” But he declined to respond to questions, maintaining a pledge to keep silent until December. He was engulfed in controversy this month after he criticized prosecution of elderly priests for pedophile acts as “vengeance” and described AIDS as a “sort of inherent justice” for promiscuous homosexual acts.
For some Catholics in the ecclesia movement and academics at the Catholic University of Louvain, Archbishop Léonard is emblematic of a remote church disconnected from a flock that yearns for more relevant rituals and active participation.
“Something is beginning to crack,” said the Rev. Gabriel Ringlet, a priest and former vice rector at the Catholic University of Louvain, which is considering dropping the “Catholic” from its name. “I think the Belgian Catholic Church is starting to feel something exceptional for the first time in 40 years. A lot of Catholics are waking up and speaking out.”
In Bruges, the city at the center of the church’s pedophilia scandal, an alternative Catholic group called De Lier tackles the church scandals in its weekly services. De Lier — The Lyre in Dutch — holds weekly services in a school chapel with a rotation of two men, two women and a priest. In recent services, church members read fragments from a Belgian church commission report that examined the plight of victims of child sex abuse. They expressed shame about a church that hushed reports of sexual abuse and used lawyerly language to avoid apology.
They have also simplified and personalized rituals, emphasizing the importance of community. Typically, they gather around a table with ceramic cups for wine and a round loaf of bread, and members are asked to recount a story of their joy and grief from the week before.
“We are looking for ways to live faith in a modern way,” said Karel Ceule, a Lier member. “If you look at the crisis today with Archbishop Léonard, he is a symbol of an old, conservative church. In Flanders, this doesn’t work anymore. We have reached a stage of history where we don’t accept that the priest has to be the go-between. We want to take charge of baptisms and communion.”
Some of the bishops in the Netherlands and Belgium have been quietly gathering information about the alternative churches, meeting with some of their members. Peter Rossel, a spokesman for Jozef De Kesel, the new bishop of Bruges, said the prelate was aware of the groups, but would not visit them anytime soon. “Now he has other priorities. He has many problems with the whole issue of sexual abuse,” Mr. Rossel said.
In the meantime, members of these groups say they make no secret of what they are doing, especially if changes come about because of the lack of priests. “If you ask the diocese officially about this, they say you may not do it,” said Bart Vanvolsem, a member of Don Bosco. “They say if there is no priest, there is no Mass. But Christ is here.”
In the early stages at Don Bosco, some people complained that services took too long. Others were distracted by the intimacy of gathering around a long wooden table. Some members didn’t want to lead a service. “I am still too traditional to do it myself,” Barbara Birkhölzer-Klein said. “What is happening here is totally natural, but I can’t do this yet.”
Mr. Delsaert had no such qualms. He donned a rainbow sash — the church’s symbol of a worship leader — and carried his notes. “It’s the second time,” he said. “For me, it’s very intense. Reading is very difficult for me because I have dyslexia.”
Almost 150 people gathered around him for a service organized by teenage members who picked a theme of peace and music from John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Mr. Delsaert delivered a homespun sermon that drew on his years as a railroad worker, urging parishioners to wage peace by talking to people in their daily lives. By bidding hello to a daily commuter, Mr. Delsaert said, “the man opened up to talk about train delays.”
“He seemed much happier,” Mr. Delsaert said.
During services, teenage members surrounded the table while a parish statement was read aloud: “We regret the pain caused by priests and those responsible in the church. We regret the damages to the victims, to the community and our church.”
Then a young girl lighted a rainbow-colored candle in the center of the table. She watched the flame flicker in memory of the 475 Belgian victims of sexual abuse.
On Nov. 4, Anderson Cooper did the country a favor. He expertly deconstructed on his CNN show the bogus rumor that President Obama’s trip to Asia would cost $200 million a day. This was an important “story.” It underscored just how far ahead of his time Mark Twain was when he said a century before the Internet, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” But it also showed that there is an antidote to malicious journalism — and that’s good journalism....
In case you missed it, a story circulated around the Web on the eve of President Obama’s trip that it would cost U.S. taxpayers $200 million a day — about $2 billion for the entire trip. Cooper said he felt impelled to check it out because the evening before he had had Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a Republican and Tea Party favorite, on his show and had asked her where exactly Republicans will cut the budget.
Instead of giving specifics, Bachmann used her airtime to inject a phony story into the mainstream. She answered: “I think we know that just within a day or so the president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He’ll be renting over 870 rooms in India, and these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending.”
The next night, Cooper explained that he felt compelled to trace that story back to its source, since someone had used his show to circulate it. His research, he said, found that it had originated from a quote by “an alleged Indian provincial official,” from the Indian state of Maharashtra, “reported by India’s Press Trust, their equivalent of our A.P. or Reuters. I say ‘alleged,’ provincial official,” Cooper added, “because we have no idea who this person is, no name was given.”
It is hard to get any more flimsy than a senior unnamed Indian official from Maharashtra talking about the cost of an Asian trip by the American president.
“It was an anonymous quote,” said Cooper. “Some reporter in India wrote this article with this figure in it. No proof was given; no follow-up reporting was done. Now you’d think if a member of Congress was going to use this figure as a fact, she would want to be pretty darn sure it was accurate, right? But there hasn’t been any follow-up reporting on this Indian story. The Indian article was picked up by The Drudge Report and other sites online, and it quickly made its way into conservative talk radio.”
Cooper then showed the following snippets: Rush Limbaugh talking about Obama’s trip: “In two days from now, he’ll be in India at $200 million a day.” Then Glenn Beck, on his radio show, saying: “Have you ever seen the president, ever seen the president go over for a vacation where you needed 34 warships, $2 billion — $2 billion, 34 warships. We are sending — he’s traveling with 3,000 people.” In Beck’s rendition, the president’s official state visit to India became “a vacation” accompanied by one-tenth of the U.S. Navy. Ditto the conservative radio talk-show host Michael Savage. He said, “$200 million? $200 million each day on security and other aspects of this incredible royalist visit; 3,000 people, including Secret Service agents.”
Cooper then added: “Again, no one really seemed to care to check the facts. For security reasons, the White House doesn’t comment on logistics of presidential trips, but they have made an exception this time." He then quoted Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, as saying, “I am not going to go into how much it costs to protect the president, [but this trip] is comparable to when President Clinton and when President Bush traveled abroad. This trip doesn’t cost $200 million a day.” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said: “I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd, this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy and some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier in support of the president’s trip to Asia. That’s just comical. Nothing close to that is being done.”
Cooper also pointed out that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the entire war effort in Afghanistan was costing about $190 million a day and that President Bill Clinton’s 1998 trip to Africa — with 1,300 people and of roughly similar duration, cost, according to the Government Accountability Office and adjusted for inflation, “about $5.2 million a day.”
When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it.
For Saudi Women, Biggest Challenge Is Getting to Play
After the 18-year-old Saudi equestrian Dalma Malhas won a bronze medal in show jumping at the first Youth Olympic Games in Singapore in August, she was singled out for praise by Jacques Rogge, chairman of the International Olympic Committee, in a news conference at the Games’ conclusion.
“This is indeed the first time that a Saudi woman is participating in an international event,” let alone winning a medal, Rogge said of Olympic events. Malhas’s achievement, he said, had made the I.O.C. “absolutely happy.”
The reaction in Malhas’s conservative Muslim homeland —where athletics for women are seen in some quarters as immodest, even immoral — has been far more complicated.
Physical activity of any kind is forbidden in Saudi Arabia’s state-run girls’ schools. Though gyms for women exist in major Saudi cities, they are usually unmarked, so that customers need not fear attracting attention.
Saudi Arabia does not permit women to represent it in international athletic competitions, and it is one of only three countries in the world that has yet to send women to the Olympic Games (the others are Qatar and Brunei). Though Saudi Arabia sent an official delegation of male athletes to Singapore for the Youth Olympics, Malhas — the daughter of an accomplished female show jumper, Arwa Mutabagani — had to enter on her own, at her own expense.
Now her bronze medal has placed her at the center of a growing controversy in the kingdom about what kinds of athletic activity, if any, are acceptable for Saudi girls and women.
The laws and customs that govern Saudi women’s lives are among the most restrictive anywhere. Public separation of the sexes is stringent. Saudi women may not drive or vote and must wear floor-length cloaks known as abayas and head scarves whenever they leave home. They may not appear in court.
Yet, in recent years, women’s issues have become a major battleground for liberals and conservatives. Saudi traditions regarding the rights and treatment of women have rarely, if ever, been so much in dispute. The issue of Saudi women in sports is a manifestation of this larger debate.
On July 31, the Saudi dissident Ali al-Ahmed, who directs the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, started a campaign called “No Women. No Play,” urging the I.O.C. to suspend Saudi Arabia from Olympic competition until it allowed female participation.
In a phone interview, Ahmed likened the position of Saudi women today to that of blacks in apartheid-era South Africa and asked why the I.O.C. had not suspended Saudi Arabia from the Games as it banned South Africa from 1964 through the end of apartheid in the early 1990s.
“Even more than political pressure, the expulsion of South Africa from the Olympics was one of the most effective tools for ending apartheid,” Ahmed said, without referring to the more prominent role accorded sports overall in South African society, or whether an Olympic ban thus had greater effect than it might on Saudi Arabia.
“The freedom to practice sports and to exercise is such a very basic issue,” Ahmed said. “It has to do with physical health. I think that once Saudi women are free to practice sports, that will open up other areas of discussion about their rights.”
The Olympic Charter states that “the practice of sport is a human right” and that “any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic movement.”
A spokeswoman for the I.O.C., Emmanuelle Moreau, suggested in an e-mail exchange that the I.O.C. had no intention of formally censuring countries that did not allow women to participate in the Olympics. She said the organization did not plan to give Saudi Arabia a deadline for women to participate, as it did with South Africa.
“The I.O.C. strives to ensure the Olympic Games and the Olympic movement are universal and nondiscriminatory,” Moreau said in an e-mail.
“National Olympic Committees are encouraged to uphold that spirit in their delegations. The I.O.C. does not give ultimatums nor deadlines but rather believes that a lot can be achieved through dialogue.”
Outside Olympic teams, there have been signs of change for Saudi sportswomen. In major cities, a handful of private basketball and soccer teams for women have sprung up. In 2008, Mutabagani was made a board member of Saudi Arabia’s Equestrian Federation, the first such post for a woman in Saudi sports.
Saudi newspaper columnists have argued that relaxing the prohibitions against physical exercise might help to stem exploding levels of obesity and osteoporosis among Saudi women.
Lina al-Maeena, who in 2003 founded Jeddah United, a women’s basketball team that has since grown into a fully-fledged sports training and management company, agrees.
“You have very high rates of diabetes, obesity and osteoporosis for women, a very high rate of depression,” she said. “You have this conservative segment here that’s using religion to oppose women’s sports. But that’s a very invalid argument.”
She hopes that pressure from the I.O.C. may help to break down the barriers to women’s athletic participation. “At the end of the day, the Olympic Charter does state that there shall be no discrimination based on gender, religion, or ethnicity. And Saudi Arabia is obviously not following the Olympic Charter.”
Liberal Saudis note that even Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammed, is reported to have enjoyed footraces against her husband and that conservative Muslim societies like Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have more open attitudes about women and sports.
Last year, the daily newspaper Al-Riyadh reported that a survey of 2,250 Saudis found that a mere 4 percent were opposed to gyms for girls and women.
But majority opinion counts for little in an absolute monarchy, where the king rules in concert with a Salafist religious establishment. Some of the most prominent clerics continue to oppose sports for women under all circumstances, arguing that sports will lead women to engage in behavior like wearing immodest clothing or leaving their homes unnecessarily.
Other clerics argue that sports are absolutely off limits only for virgins, who could become unmarriageable if they were to damage their hymens through athletic activity.
“Women should be housewives,” the Grand Mufti told the Saudi channel Al Eqtisadiah. “There is no need for them to engage in sports.”
Female Saudi athletes say they find it unproductive to debate views openly.
“I don’t want to provoke people,” Mutabagani said. “The conservative side always says, ‘No, you should be at home. You shouldn’t be traveling, you shouldn’t be competing in public.”’
Mutabagani wears a veil when she is representing Saudi Arabia overseas and said she always tries to emphasize, in interviews, the less controversial aspects of women’s athletics, like the importance of exercise for health. “I try to respect our culture,” she said. “You don’t want to create a negative opinion of women in sport.”
Maeena said that looking at women’s movements globally helped her stay optimistic.
“It’s not just in Saudi that sports for women are a political issue,” she said. “Up until 1972 with the Title 9, women in the U.S. didn’t really get equal rights in sports. And that’s, what — three decades ago? And it’s a 250-year old country.
“We’re only a 78-year-old country,” she continued. “When you gauge yourself from the historical perspective, you see that the process Saudi Arabia is going through is a very normal process that all societies have gone through in relation to different fields of endeavor for women.”
Small Cheesemaker Defies F.D.A. Over Recall
The foodies raved. The feds raided.
And now Kelli Estrella, a farmer and award-winning cheesemaker whose pastureland is tucked into a bend of the Wynoochee River here, has become a potent symbol in a contentious national debate over the safety of food produced by small farmers and how much the government should regulate it.
To her devotees, Ms. Estrella is a homespun diva of local food. With her husband and six adopted children from Liberia, she makes tasty artisan cheeses from the milk of her 36 cows and 40 goats and sells it at farmers’ markets.
Some even winds up on tables at fancy restaurants in Manhattan and Los Angeles.
But to the federal government, Ms. Estrella is a defiant businesswoman unable to keep dangerous bacteria out of her products. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration moved to shut down her business, Estrella Family Creamery, after tests found listeria in some of her cheese and she refused to agree to a broad recall of her products.
Although no illnesses have been linked to Ms. Estrella’s cheese, listeria is a sometimes deadly bacteria that is especially hazardous for the very young and the very old. Pregnant women who become infected can have miscarriages or stillbirths.
Issues of food safety and small food producers were at the fore in Washington, D.C., this week as senators struck a deal that would exempt small producers from some of the rules that would be imposed by a sweeping food safety bill. A vote is expected after Thanksgiving on the long-awaited legislation.
“They really need to go after the industrial producers,” said Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, who pushed for the exemption. “The level of risk is far less with the little guy than it is with the big guy.”
There is fuel for all sides in Ms. Estrella’s predicament: it shows that even food from a revered artisan producer can pose risks, while demonstrating the pitfalls for regulators who may be viewed as heavy-handed.
Ms. Estrella’s case has drawn visceral reaction from foodies because the allegations threaten a core belief of what has come to be known as the locavore movement: that food from small, local producers is inherently better and safer than food made by large, faceless corporations. Her supporters cast her as a David fighting a two-headed Goliath of Big Food and Big Government.
“She’s an incredible craftsperson and one of the best cheesemakers in the country,” said Tia Keenan, a New York restaurant consultant who specializes in cheese. “The laws regarding food safety are really meant to regulate large-scale, corporate, industrial food production, and small food producers really suffer under those guidelines.”
Federal and state regulators, meanwhile, say they have very real concerns about the safety of cheese, especially softer varieties like brie and mozzarella that are more likely to harbor listeria. The F.D.A. began in April to test soft-cheese makers for listeria, visiting 102 facilities, large and small, and found the bacteria in 24 of them. While the list of facilities where listeria was found included some large factories, more than half of the makers were artisanal producers.
Regulators say that safety, not size, is what’s important.
“When you’ve got people that make good cheese, you want them to be successful,” said Claudia Coles, the food safety program manager for the Washington State Department of Agriculture. “But our first premise is, we don’t want people marketing an unsafe product.”
William Marler, a Seattle food safety lawyer, said it was clear that regulators tried to work with Ms. Estrella and that he was puzzled by the attitude that Ms. Estrella’s supporters appear to have toward the F.D.A. “I just don’t know how they make the leap from the government trying to do the right thing for public health to ‘they’re food Nazis in the pocket of big agribusiness.’ ”
At least nine artisan cheesemakers have had recalls this year. Most involved listeria in soft cheeses, but this month, a California cheesemaker, Bravo Farms, recalled a gouda, a semi-hard cheese, from Costco stores after it was linked to an E. coli outbreak that sickened 37 people.
Artisan cheese is made by hand in small batches, often using raw milk that is not pasteurized to kill bacteria (raw-milk cheeses must be aged 60 days to make them safer). In recent years, the number of artisan cheesemakers has grown rapidly. Washington State now has 34, up from about 18 in 2005. Vermont, another hot spot, has 48, up from 27 in 2005.
Ms. Estrella’s problems began in February, when state tests found listeria in her cheese and throughout the farm building where she makes and ages it. The bacteria was even in a humidifier that officials said blew it around the facility. Ms. Estrella recalled some cheese and did a vigorous cleaning and renovation.
But in August, F.D.A. inspectors again found the bacteria in her facility and cheese. In early September, they asked her to recall all of her products.
Ms. Estrella said no, a rare act of defiance by any food maker. She argued that the F.D.A. had found listeria only in her soft cheeses and that hundreds of wheels of hard cheese were safe. She estimated the value of the cheese the government wanted destroyed at more than $100,000.
Last month, the F.D.A., which does not have the power to order a recall (the food safety bill in the Senate would give it that authority), went to court, saying the “persistent presence” of listeria meant all of Ms. Estrella’s cheese should be considered contaminated. In response, a federal judge sent marshals to effectively impound the cheese, preventing her from doing business.
The F.D.A. declined to discuss Ms. Estrella’s case because of the litigation. But a spokeswoman, Siobhan DeLancey, said, “When we find a pathogen in a facility, especially one that can kill or cause miscarriages, we’re going to take action.”
Ms. Estrella plans to fight back in court.
“Where’s the balance here?” she said on a recent afternoon as she stood in one of the aging rooms on her farm, surrounded by wheels of cheese she is forbidden to sell. “Let’s work together. Let’s not just put cheesemakers out of business.”
She says she believes that the F.D.A.’s crackdown is part of a larger campaign against raw milk, and she is fighting for her customers’ right to eat whatever they choose. “I don’t think this issue is about bacteria and it’s not about cheese,” she said. “I think that we’re losing our freedom.”
The F.D.A. said it was not targeting artisan cheesemakers or those who use raw milk, and its listeria testing had included producers across the spectrum.
While cheesemakers acknowledge the need for good sanitation, some supporters question the agency’s approach.
“If the F.D.A. wanted to shut down the U.S. artisan cheese industry, all they’d have to do is do this environmental surveillance and the odds of finding a pathogen would be pretty great,” said Catherine W. Donnelly, co-director of the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese of the University of Vermont, referring to the listeria testing at cheese plants. “Is our role to shut these places down or help them?”
Ms. Estrella has received support from loyal customers, retailers and other artisan producers. Fueling that support is the fact that no cases of illness have been linked to her cheese.
Dr. Anthony Marfin, Washington State’s epidemiologist for communicable diseases, said it was possible the contamination was relatively low, so no severe illnesses were reported. Mild listeria infections can cause flulike symptoms or nausea.
But he said that once the organism was in a food, it could grow to harmful concentrations.
Kurt Beecher Dammeier, owner of Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, an artisan cheesemaker and retailer in Seattle, said the F.D.A. needed to work harder to understand artisans like Ms. Estrella. “The F.D.A. comes from an industrial, zero-defect, highly processed, repeatable perspective, and she comes from a more ancient time of creating with what she gets,” he said. “I’m not sure they can really even have a conversation.”
I.R.S. Sits on Data Pointing to Missing Children
For parents of missing children, any scrap of information that could lead to an abductor is precious.
Three years into an excruciating search for her abducted son, Susan Lau got such a tip. Her estranged husband, who had absconded with their 9-year-old from Brooklyn, had apparently filed a tax return claiming the boy as an exemption.
Investigators moved quickly to seek the address where his tax refund had been mailed. But the Internal Revenue Service was not forthcoming.
“They just basically said forget about it,” said Julianne Sylva, a child abduction investigator who is now deputy district attorney in Santa Clara County, Calif.
The government, which by its own admission has data that could be helpful in tracking down the thousands of missing children in the United States, says that taxpayer privacy laws severely restrict the release of information from tax returns. “We will do whatever we can within the confines of the law to make it easier for law enforcement to find abducted children,” said Michelle Eldridge, an I.R.S. spokeswoman.
The privacy laws, enacted a generation ago to prevent Watergate-era abuses of confidential taxpayer information, have specific exceptions allowing the I.R.S. to turn over information in child support cases and to help federal agencies determine whether an applicant qualifies for income-based federal benefits.
But because of guidelines in the handling of criminal cases, there are several obstacles for parents and investigators pursuing a child abductor — even when the taxpayer in question is a fugitive and the subject of a felony warrant.
“It’s one of those areas where you would hope that common sense would prevail,” said Ernie Allen, president and chief executive of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “We are talking about people who are fugitives, who have criminal warrants against them. And children who are at risk.”
About 200,000 family abductions are reported each year in the United States, most of which stem from custody disputes between estranged spouses. About 12,000 last longer than six months, according to Justice Department statistics, and involve parental abductors who assume false identities and travel the country to escape detection.
But, counterintuitive as it may seem, a significant number file one of bureaucracy’s most invasive documents, a federal tax return. A study released by the Treasury Department in 2007 examined the Social Security numbers of 1,700 missing children and the relatives suspected of abducting them, and found that more than a third had been used in tax returns filed after the abductions took place.
Criminologists say it is unclear what motivates a child abductor to file a tax return: confusion, financial desperation for a refund or an attempt to avoid compounding their criminal problems by failing to pay taxes. Whatever the reason, the details in a return on an abductor’s whereabouts, work history and mailing address can be crucial to detectives searching for a missing child.
“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” said Harold Copus, a retired F.B.I. agent who investigated missing child cases, of why abductors provide such information. “But if they were thinking clearly, they wouldn’t have abducted their child in the first place.”
The law forbids the I.R.S. from turning over data from tax returns unless a parental abduction is being investigated as a federal crime and a United States district judge orders the information released. But the vast majority of parental abduction cases are investigated by state and local prosecutors, not as federal crimes, say investigators and missing children’s advocates. Even when the F.B.I. does intercede in parental abduction cases, requests for I.R.S. data are rarely granted.
When the Treasury Department study identified hundreds of suspected abductors who had filed tax returns, for instance, a federal judge in Virginia refused to issue an order authorizing the I.R.S. to turn over their addresses to investigators. The judge, Leonie M. Brinkema, declined to discuss her decision.
Advocates for missing children say that federal judges often argue that parental abductions are better suited to family court than criminal court.
“There’s this sense that because the child is with at least one of their parents, it’s not really a problem,” said Abby Potash, director of Team Hope, which counsels parents who are searching for a missing child. Ms. Potash’s son was abducted by a relative and kept for eight months before he was recovered. “But when you’re the parent who’s left behind, it is devastating. You’re being robbed of your son or daughter’s childhood.”
In Ms. Lau’s case, her search for her missing son dragged on for two years after the I.R.S. refused investigators’ request for her ex-husband’s tax return. She actually got the tip from the I.R.S., which disallowed her request to claim the boy on her own tax return because someone else had. The boy was eventually found in Utah, after his photo appeared in a flier distributed by missing children’s groups, and he was reunited with his mother at age 15 — five years after they were separated.
I.R.S. officials are quick to point out that they have worked closely with missing children’s advocates in some areas. The I.R.S.’s “Picture Them Home” program has included photos of thousands of missing children with forms mailed to millions of taxpayers since 2001. More than 80 children were recovered with the help of that program.
Still, attempts to change the law to give the tax agency more latitude have sputtered over the last decade. Dennis DeConcini, a former Democratic senator from Arizona, lobbied for the change in 2004 on behalf of a child advocacy group, but said that it never gained traction because some members of Congress feared that any release of I.R.S. data could lead to a gradual erosion of taxpayer privacy. In recent years, much of the legislation involving missing children has focused on international abductions.
One problem missing children’s advocates have wrestled with in proposing legislation is determining how much information the I.R.S. should be asked to release from a suspected abductor’s tax return. Should disclosure be required only if a child’s Social Security number is listed on a return? Should child abduction investigators be given only the address where a tax return was mailed? Or the location of an employer who has withheld taxes on a suspected abductor?
Griselda Gonzalez, who has not seen her children since 2007, holds fleeting hope that some type of information might reunite her family. Diego and Tammy Flores were just 2 and 3 years old when their father took them from their home in Victorville, Calif., for a weeklong visit and never returned. After Ms. Gonzalez reported their disappearance, a felony warrant for kidnapping was issued for the father, Francisco Flores. His financial records suggest he meticulously planned his actions for months — withdrawing money from various accounts and taking out a second mortgage — so Ms. Gonzalez doubts he would claim the children as dependents on a tax return.
But it gnaws at her that some federal laws seemed more concerned with the privacy of a fugitive than the safety of children.
“When your kids are taken from you, the hardest part is at night, thinking about them going to sleep,” she said. “You wonder who’s tucking them in, who will hug them if they have a bad dream or taking them to the bathroom if they wake up. And you ask yourself whether you’ve done everything possible to find them.”
“It would be good to know that you tried everything,” she said.
Missing children’s advocates see the I.R.S. data as a potentially powerful resource.
“There are hundreds of cases this could help solve,” said Cindy Rudometkin of the Polly Klaas Foundation. “And even if it helped solve one case — imagine if that child returned home was yours.”
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 01:23 pm (UTC)What makes the situation around the paper hairy is that it's about a law regarding age of consent that has exceptions for teens that are close in age. So, for example, a 12 year old and 14 year old can have consensual sex, but a 12 year old and a 15 year can't. The law considers them too far apart in age and would likely consider it rape. The law itself (at least the age exemption thing) is pretty ingenious from what I can tell, since it eliminates the issue of the 18 year old and his 16 year old girlfriend that we often see here in the United States.
As for those under age 12, the paper also addresses that, reporting that "42.9% of males and 34.3% of females reported that their partner was also less than 13 years of age," which is, for the purposes of the law in question, legal, consensual sex.
I think, too, the use of phrases such as "forced sex" and "exploitative sex" were used in an effort to retain focus on the studies themselves, since the word "rape" are trigger words that evoke strong emotions, and while the emotions are rightful and justified, they do tend to impede the goals of studies and reports on studies (because appeal to emotion in general breaks down a logical debate and renders the debate useless, because you can't debate emotions).
The blog author does have some great points, but I think she got hung up on the verbiage and kind of missed the point of the paper. The paper isn't entirely innocent, though, since it is attempting to address a number of issues at once (consenting sex among peers, rape--statutory or otherwise, the effects of the law change on both for teens ages 14 and 15, and the age at which teens first have sex, consensual or not) and seems to have done so in a somewhat confusing manner.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 05:44 am (UTC)It's pretty much the exact opposite of teaching rape prevention. Teaching people not to rape actually does seem to be of some use though, and it wouldn't necessarily be bad to do that young. Because while we worry about today's generation of kids, they will turn into the next generation, and some of them will be the next generation of rapists. So, teaching kids not to rape is of value. It just isn't directly of value. But it's more useful than teaching them that the secret is to not let someone rape you, when kind of by the nature of the thing, rape is about what someone does when you do not consent. And it's not like we're not already aware of the fact that adults who want to take advantage of children have a huge host of psychological tricks they use, and that children are very vulnerable, and that "just say no" isn't sufficient against that.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 08:54 pm (UTC)It makes a lot of internal sense to me (if you presume that male prostitutes only have sex with men). If condoms are bad because you're not supposed to play games with fertility/reproduction, then in a m/m (or f/f, for that matter) situation where fertility is completely not part of the picture, you can judge condoms on different merits (such as preventing disease).
Not saying I agree with everything the Pope says, just that if you accept the premises, this reaction seems to me like a fairly logical conclusion.
Catholics in Belgium Start Parishes of Their Own
I wonder why those people call themselves Catholics.
Isn't part of the point of having a catholic (= universal, roughly) church that of having one that's the same all over the world?
Then if you don't accept the authority of the church or their prerogative to define the "rules of the game", aren't you more protestant (with a lower-case P - in the sense of "accepting some but not all tenets and practices of the Catholic church", more or less) than catholic?
The government, which by its own admission has data that could be helpful in tracking down the thousands of missing children in the United States, says that taxpayer privacy laws severely restrict the release of information from tax returns.
[...]
“It’s one of those areas where you would hope that common sense would prevail,” said Ernie Allen, president and chief executive of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “We are talking about people who are fugitives, who have criminal warrants against them. And children who are at risk.”
I can kind of see the IRS's point here. Part of the practice of good data protection is not collecting more data than you need for a given purpose and not using the data for other purposes than those which you collected it for.
I'm reminded of the toll collection scheme for heavy vehicles introduced into Germany several years ago: this would be enforced by automatic cameras and other monitoring devices spread throughout the motorway network to make sure that appropriate vehicles detected had paid the tolls. When this started, great store was placed on the fact that this information would only be used for toll purposes.
However, as I understand it, the data has now been officially opened slightly for other uses, such as (I think) to track down the movements of certain kinds of criminals.
Or about the debate regarding the obligation of Internet Service Providers to store connection information even where they do not need it themselves (e.g. for billing purposes - usually because the customer has a flat-rate tariff, so they don't need to log how many hours they customer was on-line or how much they transferred). This debate has often centred on "once the data is available, it will be used for other things than originally intended"; I think this is called "mission creep".
I'm also reminded of how wiretapping laws try to reduce secrecy of the post and (even more) of telecommunications, usually under the guise of tracking terrorists planning or other criminals coordinating their moves with accomplices.
A bit of secrecy should be taken for granted, even if that makes some aspects of law enforcement more difficult, though I couldn't say where exactly to draw the line.
But in general, one should probably ask "why should I open this data?" rather than "why should I protect this data?" - the favourite example of crypto enthusiasts being postal mail: when people send each other letters, the usual question is not "Why did you put it in an envelope rather than sending a postcard? You got something to hide, citizen?". There, it's taken for granted that some things are not easily accessible, and this same attitude could, perhaps, be a bit more widespread.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 09:02 pm (UTC)Also, I'm wary of appeals to emotion like this one - "Won't someone think of the children?" I don't think they're always conducive to the most sensible decisions.
Imagine if someone proposed surgically implanting GPS tracking chips into children from birth so they could be tracked remotely. "Even if it helped solve one case - imagine if that child returned home was yours."
I still think that would be overly invasive for the proposed benefit: or in other words, that the ends do not automatically justify the means.
We live with a certain measure of risk every day: calculated risk (well, calculated to some extent), because it's a trade-off with convenience.
We could reduce a whole lot of deaths every year by banning automobiles. (Over 30'000 fatal crashes per year in the US according to this .gov site (http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx), for example: far, far more than people who die by terrorist attacks in the US.) But do we? Is this even seriously proposed? No, because most people consider the benefits of allowing automobiles to far outweigh the risks they pose.
So similarly, one should not simply say that "there are benefits, so we should do this", but consider the entire ramifications and realise, that yes, a certain amount of risk is considered acceptable, as a compromise. It sounds bitter when you look at an individual, specific, concrete casualty of those risks we take as a society, but pretending that we can eliminate risks while keeping the rest of life the same is not particularly useful, it seems to me.