Pakistan: Polio Vaccine Refused Over Rumors of American Plot

Polio cases jump in Pakistan as clerics declare vaccination an American plot

Declan Walsh (The Guardian)

The parents of 24,000 children in northern Pakistan refused to allow health workers to administer polio vaccinations last month, mostly due to rumours that the harmless vaccine was an American plot to sterilise innocent Muslim children.

The disinformation – spread by extremist clerics using mosque loudspeakers and illegal radio stations, and by word of mouth – has caused a sharp jump in polio cases in Pakistan and hit global efforts to eradicate the debilitating disease.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 39 cases of polio in Pakistan in 2006, up from 28 in 2005. The disease is concentrated in North-West Frontier Province, where 60% of the refusals were attributed to “religious reasons”.

See previous related posts here and here.

Texas: The Tulia 46; a Tale of Racial and Economic Injustice

Racism and Corruption in Tulia.
Texas Injustice in Black and White

J. L. Chestnut, Jr. (CounterPunch)

On the morning of July 23, 1999 in the hot and dusty little town of Tulia, Texas, in the Panhandle area some 50 miles south of Amarrillo, law enforcement people arrested 10% of all the blacks in that small town. Can you believe that? Officials tipped off the TV and radio people so they could parade these bewildered, unkempt, frightened blacks before the TV cameras for the evening news. The sheriff, a not-so-bright redneck, by the name of Larry Stewart, announced with great fanfare that all the people arrested were drug traffickers.

This elected nut with a badge was actually saying on TV that 10% of the black people in his town were trafficking in drugs. The people arrested included a hard-working pig farmer, a forklift operator and many ordinary young men, women and even some children. If these poor and frightened black folks were drug traffickers they were the strangest and poorest in this country. They had no money to speak of, no drugs and no weapons…

More about the “Tulia 46″ legal fiasco from the Drug Policy Institute and Wikipedia.

India: Catholic Initiative to Punish Child Marriages in West Bengal

Catholic Bishop in West Bengal has decided to take affirmative action against child marriages among his flock. The guilty families will find themselves ex-communicated for 3 years.

Priests act over child marriage

Subir Bhaumik (BBC News)

Roman Catholic priests in some districts of the Indian state of West Bengal have punished Christians who continue to practise child marriages.

Catholics who allowed children to be married have even been excommunicated.

Their children have been denied baptism and the “guilty” families have been barred from attending Church functions.

Child marriage – an ancient Hindu custom – is banned by law in India, but is believed to be widely practised, particularly among the rural poor…

Tennessee: 7-Year Child Custody Battle Ends

Qin Luo and Shaoqiang He have finally been awarded custody of their daughter after a seven-year custody battle with an American family that falsely claimed the Hes had abandoned her.

How could this case have been allowed to drag on for so long? The little girl, separated from her parents at infancy, will be re-united with a family, including siblings, who she does not know. She will also be relocating from Tennessee to China, so there will be language and cultural issues along with the other changes.

This is so wrong, and I hope that the transition is made easy for this poor girl. Her parents should never have had their parental rights severed in the first place. And certainly, in the interest of the child, the case should have been resolved much sooner.

Tenn. custody case dragged on for years

Woody Baird (Associated Press Writer via Yahoo)

Qin Luo He wailed in broken English that rich Americans were stealing her baby. But it took almost seven years before Tennessee courts agreed to return the child to her.

That delay, say some legal experts, is one of the most scandalous aspects of the whole heartbreaking case.

“That’s a disaster. It’s an incredibly long time,” said Bruce Boyer, director of the Loyola University ChildLaw Center in Chicago.

Syria: Grand Mufti Protests Honor Killing, Calls for Legal Reforms

This article states that only recently has Syria’s Grand Mufti Ahmad Hassoun publicly condemned the crime of honor killing. That must be a typo, right? In a country where around 200 honor killings per year are committed, surely this isn’t the first time that the Grand Mufti felt that the crime was worth speaking against…

‘Honor’ killing spurs outcry in Syria
A 16-year-old’s killing spurred the country’s grand mufti to call for legal reform and protections.

Rasha Elass (The Christian Science Monitor)

Sixteen-year-old Zahra Ezzo died at the hospital last month after a brutal attack. But it was her brother who confessed to killing her – and her family who appointed him to carry out the murder.

Some experts estimate that 200 to 300 honor killings like Zahra’s occur every year in Syria. Most receive little or no attention. But Zahra’s murder – in part because it happened in the capital and not a rural area – has compelled Syria’s grand mufti, cleric Ahmad Hassoun, to publicly condemn the crime, calling for the first time for the immediate protection of girls at risk and for legal reform on the basis that such crimes are un-Islamic. President Bashar al-Assad has also promised to find a solution.

Among the public, too, debate is rising about the practice and the laws that protect men who carry out such killings…

…Syria’s law is lenient on a man who kills or injures his female relative if he catches her in “illegitimate sexual acts with another,” or in a “suspicious state with another.” If Zahra’s brother is tried under this law, he might get out of jail in three months.

Gaza/USA: Raising Yousuf, Diary of a Palestinian Mother

A very nice profile of blogger Laila El-Haddad in Haaretz.

A mother’s resistance

Ofri Ilani (Haaretz)

Laila El-Haddad’s blog took shape in a very unusual way. Her son, Yousuf, was less than a year old when she returned to her Gaza home from a visit to the United States, where her husband, Yassine, lives. The blog, “Raising Yousuf” (a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com), had just begun, and it dealt with common child-raising experiences, mainly first syllables and words.

“It was initially purely about Yousuf and his milestones and shenanigans … Then one day, I think it was December 2004, on my way back to Gaza via Egypt, Rafah Crossing was shut down, rendering Yousuf and I refugees in Egypt. We ended up waiting a total of 55 days for the border to open, never knowing whether that day would be tomorrow or the next day or one month or one year. It was a very stressful time for us, and we hardly knew anyone in Cairo. So I began to write about our experiences waiting together on my blog.”

“Gradually,” she says, “the blog was transformed into reflections about how the occupation has become very personal for Palestinians. How it affects us not only as Palestinians or doctors or journalists, but also as mothers and fathers and children, to the very last mundane detail of how we live our lives…”

You can read Laila El-Haddad’s blog, Raising Yousuf here.