Protesters gather across from Los Angeles Police Department headquarters Saturday to rally in support of Peter Liang, a New York police officer convicted of manslaughter in the deadly 2014 shooting of an unarmed black man .
Los Angeles - Hundreds of demonstrators gathered in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, carrying signs and chanting in support of a New York City police officer convicted in a deadly shooting.
The crowd, which was predominantly Chinese American, was one of many that rallied in cities across the U.S. on Saturday to protest the conviction of Peter Liang, who is also Chinese American.
Liang was found guilty of manslaughter earlier this month in the 2014 killing of Akai Gurley, an unarmed black man who died from a ricochet bullet that the rookie cop fired in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project.
The deadly encounter was one of many in recent months that drew heightened scrutiny amid the heated national debate over how police officers use force, particularly against African American men.
In Los Angeles, demonstrators chanted Liang's name Saturday as they circled the sidewalks in front of City Hall. Cars drove slowly down the surrounding streets, horns honking as supporters held signs out of the windows. At one point, a black-and-white LAPD cruiser whooped its siren in front of the crowd, drawing cheers.
Supporters held signs plastered with slogans written in English and Chinese: "Save Peter Liang," "Accident not crime" and "All lives matter."
Fliers handed out by demonstrators expressed "the deepest condolences" for Gurley's family. But, supporters wrote, they were "equally saddened by the selective and unjust prosecution of Peter Liang, who is made the scapegoat of the police brutality that has long troubled our society."
Xiayi Shirley Zhang, a 27-year-old who lives downtown, stood in front of the LAPD's headquarters, watching the larger group across the street. "Scapegoat" was written in Chinese on one side of her sign.
Zhang questioned why Liang was convicted when so many other high-profile police shootings were "far more obviously" questionable. She also wondered why the NYPD put the inexperienced officer in a high-crime neighborhood.
"It is a tragedy," she said of the fatal shooting. "But to us, with the criminal conviction, the system let us down, let Peter down."
Zhang said she was glad to see "the Asian community showing our muscle," but emphasized that their goal was to promote fairness for everyone, regardless of race.
"It should matter for anyone. It shouldn't just matter for Asians," she said. "Really, all of us are fighting for a fair and just system."
Ken Jun Meng, who lives in Rowland Heights, agreed that Gurley's death was a tragedy, especially for the man's family. But convicting Liang, he said, only made the situation worse.
"Don't make another tragedy. Don't make another sad story," he said. "We came down here for justice."
Sunday , 21 February 2016
Saturday 20 February 2016
Trump wins South Carolina primary Cruz and Rubio battle for second as Bush quits the race
Donal Trump
New York - Donald Trump rode a week of insults directed at a popular pope and a GOP president to trounce his opponents in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary Saturday, the most convincing evidence to date that his establishment-smashing campaign is on track to win the nomination.
None of Trump's rivals came close to knocking him off Saturday, despite – or perhaps because of – his position at the center of one of the most polarizing campaign weeks in recent history.
“There’s nothing easy about running for president, I can tell you,” Trump told a cheering crowd in Spartanburg, S.C., late Saturday. "It’s tough. It’s nasty. It’s mean. It’s vicious. It’s beautiful. When you win, it’s beautiful, and we are going to start winning for our country.”
On the other end of the spectrum was the night's biggest casualty, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who quit the race after months of limping along in Trump's shadow and as the target of much of Trump's derision.
"I'm proud of the campaign we've run," Bush told supporters. "But the people of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina have spoken."
With about one-third of the ballots counted, Trump had about 33% of the vote. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, also running as a party agitator, was running just barely ahead of Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for second place.
As he has throughout the campaign, Trump dominated the vote of Republicans without a college education and those with incomes below $100,000. College graduates were closely divided among backers of Trump, Cruz and Rubio. Those with incomes above $100,000 split their vote between Trump and Rubio, the exit poll indicated.
Almost the only significant demographic group that did not go for Trump were those who called themselves "very conservative," who sided with Cruz.
About half of voters did not make their decision until the last week, the exit poll indicated.
Kevin Holley was still undecided midday Saturday between Trump and Rubio as he headed to a poll in Edgefield, the birthplace of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond.
"We need change," Holley said.
Trump has "a little spoiled brat" in him, but Rubio "flip-flops too much," said Holley, a technician.
For his part, Bush entered the race last year as the front-runner and immediately attracted more funding and high-profile endorsements than any other candidate in what was once a field of more than a dozen.
But voters already in Iowa and New Hampshire and in repeated polls this election season were not looking for another Bush, nor have they paid much mind to the wonkish candidate’s detailed policy proposals that harked back to the conservative ideals he championed as a two-term governor a decade ago.
South Carolina not only ended his candidacy, it may also signal the end of his family’s long hold on the Republican Party.
Trump attacked Bush relentlessly as “low energy,” and he shattered taboos during last weekend’s debate when he accused his brother, President George W. Bush, of lying to bring the country to war in Iraq and failing to keep the country safe from the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Bush family had long counted on South Carolina voters to hoist them in tough times, and Jeb Bush campaigned throughout the week with both his 90-year-old mother, Barbara, and his brother, the former president.
“I feel sorry for Bush,” said Rick Arkell of Columbia, a retired weather forecaster. “He has the wrong last name.”
Trump did not only spar with Bush’s legacy this week. He also took on Pope Francis over immigration and Trump’s oft-stated goal of building a border wall to stop illegal immigration from Mexico. Francis had asserted to reporters, “A person who only thinks about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”
Trump did not come close to backing down, calling Francis’ comments “disgraceful,” and insisting that the pontiff would pray for a Trump presidency “if and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS," using another name for the Islamic State militant group.
Trump’s voters seemed to lap it all up, becoming more devoted to him with each fight. As one of them said in an interview this week, “We’re voting with our middle finger.”
"Enough bull," said another supporter, Wayne Wates, a retired butcher on his way in to vote for Trump in Edgefield on Saturday. "He's going to change things, I hope."
The sound of gunfire at a nearby range could be heard outside the hall. Just down the road, the central plaza in the town where the high school is named for Thurmond, bustled with activity.
Trump continues to alienate large groups of voters — 40% of all voters polled in a national Fox News poll conducted this week said Trump was the candidate they would most dread watching on television for the next four years.
Yet he maintains seemingly unflappable support from about a third of the Republican electorate. Challengers are hoping that gives them a one-on-one opening.
But two factors could conspire to give Trump the nomination.
First, his challengers continue to find reasons to remain in the race, and the longer the field remains crowded, the harder it is for any one of them to attract more voters than Trump in a given state. In fact, one of Rubio’s main arguments is “the longer this goes on, the worse it’s going to be,” and therefore he is the candidate who can unify the party.
Second, polls show an increasing number of Republicans have become comfortable with Trump leading the party’s ticket in the November general election. In the Fox Poll, 74% of Republicans said they would be at least somewhat satisfied with Trump as president. That number was far smaller (43%) among all voters.
To beat back Trump, Cruz, who won the Iowa caucuses, will need to pick up wins in a slew of Southern state primaries held March 1, and hope other contenders drop out.
Though retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has drawn little support, his Christian conservative followers may flock to Cruz. But the Texas senator ultimately will have to persuade more voters to embrace his pure form of conservatism and reject Trump as a phony, a case he has been trying to make for weeks.
ubio, who was helped by his endorsement this week from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, has a different challenge. He needs Bush to drop out, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich to lose the confidence of mainstream Republicans. But the Florida senator also will have to begin winning states, and hope that a majority of Republicans decide they want a more mainstream candidate, despite polls showing voters are looking for candidates who have not served in government.
Hunter Pendarvis knows he is fighting a losing battle, but he still voted for Rubio as the Republican candidate he believes is the best alternative to Trump. Pendarvis, a 30-year-old real estate agent who moved back home after living in New York City, hopes Rubio can pick up some momentum after Saturday's primary and the race shifts into other Southern states.
"It's going to be a long slog," he said
Sunday, 21 February 2016
New York - Donald Trump rode a week of insults directed at a popular pope and a GOP president to trounce his opponents in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary Saturday, the most convincing evidence to date that his establishment-smashing campaign is on track to win the nomination.
None of Trump's rivals came close to knocking him off Saturday, despite – or perhaps because of – his position at the center of one of the most polarizing campaign weeks in recent history.
“There’s nothing easy about running for president, I can tell you,” Trump told a cheering crowd in Spartanburg, S.C., late Saturday. "It’s tough. It’s nasty. It’s mean. It’s vicious. It’s beautiful. When you win, it’s beautiful, and we are going to start winning for our country.”
On the other end of the spectrum was the night's biggest casualty, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who quit the race after months of limping along in Trump's shadow and as the target of much of Trump's derision.
"I'm proud of the campaign we've run," Bush told supporters. "But the people of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina have spoken."
With about one-third of the ballots counted, Trump had about 33% of the vote. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, also running as a party agitator, was running just barely ahead of Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida for second place.
As he has throughout the campaign, Trump dominated the vote of Republicans without a college education and those with incomes below $100,000. College graduates were closely divided among backers of Trump, Cruz and Rubio. Those with incomes above $100,000 split their vote between Trump and Rubio, the exit poll indicated.
Almost the only significant demographic group that did not go for Trump were those who called themselves "very conservative," who sided with Cruz.
About half of voters did not make their decision until the last week, the exit poll indicated.
Kevin Holley was still undecided midday Saturday between Trump and Rubio as he headed to a poll in Edgefield, the birthplace of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond.
"We need change," Holley said.
Trump has "a little spoiled brat" in him, but Rubio "flip-flops too much," said Holley, a technician.
For his part, Bush entered the race last year as the front-runner and immediately attracted more funding and high-profile endorsements than any other candidate in what was once a field of more than a dozen.
But voters already in Iowa and New Hampshire and in repeated polls this election season were not looking for another Bush, nor have they paid much mind to the wonkish candidate’s detailed policy proposals that harked back to the conservative ideals he championed as a two-term governor a decade ago.
South Carolina not only ended his candidacy, it may also signal the end of his family’s long hold on the Republican Party.
Trump attacked Bush relentlessly as “low energy,” and he shattered taboos during last weekend’s debate when he accused his brother, President George W. Bush, of lying to bring the country to war in Iraq and failing to keep the country safe from the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Bush family had long counted on South Carolina voters to hoist them in tough times, and Jeb Bush campaigned throughout the week with both his 90-year-old mother, Barbara, and his brother, the former president.
“I feel sorry for Bush,” said Rick Arkell of Columbia, a retired weather forecaster. “He has the wrong last name.”
Trump did not only spar with Bush’s legacy this week. He also took on Pope Francis over immigration and Trump’s oft-stated goal of building a border wall to stop illegal immigration from Mexico. Francis had asserted to reporters, “A person who only thinks about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”
Trump did not come close to backing down, calling Francis’ comments “disgraceful,” and insisting that the pontiff would pray for a Trump presidency “if and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS," using another name for the Islamic State militant group.
Trump’s voters seemed to lap it all up, becoming more devoted to him with each fight. As one of them said in an interview this week, “We’re voting with our middle finger.”
"Enough bull," said another supporter, Wayne Wates, a retired butcher on his way in to vote for Trump in Edgefield on Saturday. "He's going to change things, I hope."
The sound of gunfire at a nearby range could be heard outside the hall. Just down the road, the central plaza in the town where the high school is named for Thurmond, bustled with activity.
Trump continues to alienate large groups of voters — 40% of all voters polled in a national Fox News poll conducted this week said Trump was the candidate they would most dread watching on television for the next four years.
Yet he maintains seemingly unflappable support from about a third of the Republican electorate. Challengers are hoping that gives them a one-on-one opening.
But two factors could conspire to give Trump the nomination.
First, his challengers continue to find reasons to remain in the race, and the longer the field remains crowded, the harder it is for any one of them to attract more voters than Trump in a given state. In fact, one of Rubio’s main arguments is “the longer this goes on, the worse it’s going to be,” and therefore he is the candidate who can unify the party.
Second, polls show an increasing number of Republicans have become comfortable with Trump leading the party’s ticket in the November general election. In the Fox Poll, 74% of Republicans said they would be at least somewhat satisfied with Trump as president. That number was far smaller (43%) among all voters.
To beat back Trump, Cruz, who won the Iowa caucuses, will need to pick up wins in a slew of Southern state primaries held March 1, and hope other contenders drop out.
Though retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has drawn little support, his Christian conservative followers may flock to Cruz. But the Texas senator ultimately will have to persuade more voters to embrace his pure form of conservatism and reject Trump as a phony, a case he has been trying to make for weeks.
ubio, who was helped by his endorsement this week from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, has a different challenge. He needs Bush to drop out, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich to lose the confidence of mainstream Republicans. But the Florida senator also will have to begin winning states, and hope that a majority of Republicans decide they want a more mainstream candidate, despite polls showing voters are looking for candidates who have not served in government.
Hunter Pendarvis knows he is fighting a losing battle, but he still voted for Rubio as the Republican candidate he believes is the best alternative to Trump. Pendarvis, a 30-year-old real estate agent who moved back home after living in New York City, hopes Rubio can pick up some momentum after Saturday's primary and the race shifts into other Southern states.
"It's going to be a long slog," he said
Sunday, 21 February 2016
India to Change Its Decades - Old Reliance on Female Sterilization
Women lined up for examinations this month before sterilization surgery at a government hospital in Mahendragarh, India.
MAHENDRAGARH, India — This is what family planning in India often looks like: Women in their 20s, mostly farmers’ wives, gather at dawn on the stairs of a district hospital. Hours later, a surgeon arrives. His time is short. He asks the women to sit in a row on the floor of the operating room and then, in operations lasting a few minutes apiece, uses a laparoscope to sever their fallopian tubes, ensuring they will never again bear a child.
For decades, India has relied on female sterilization as its primary mode of contraception, funding about four million tubal ligations every year, more than any other country. This year, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modiwill take a major step toward modernizing that system, introducing injectable contraceptives free of charge in government facilities. The World Health Organization recommends their use without restriction for women of child bearing age.
New birth control options have long been advocated by international organizations, among them the United States Agency for International Development and theBill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They say Indian women — often worn out, anemic and at higher risk of death because they bear children young and often — urgently need methods to delay or space pregnancies.
The number of lives touched by such policies is enormous and growing. India will soon surpass China as the world’s most populous nation, and by 2050 it is expected to gain 400 million new citizens, more than the population of the United StatesParadoxically, here in India, the keenest opposition to these newer methods of birth control— ones seen in the West as empowering women to control their fertility — has come from some women’s activist groups that distrust the safety of these methods and believe that profit-hungry Western pharmaceutical companies are pushing them. Despite growing evidence of the safety of the injectables and their increasingly widespread use across South Asia, these groups have continued to oppose them. And it is Mr. Modi’s socially conservative Bharatiya Janata Party that has broken with decades of resistance to injectables.
The shift in policy has come in part because the government is less concerned about opposition from civil society groups, most of them more closely aligned with the previous ruling party, the Indian National Congress. Officials were also spurred by a medical disaster in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, where 13 women died in 2014 after under going tubal ligation at a high-volume government “sterilization camp.”
“I thought it was incumbent on the government to provide it as a choice,” said C.K. Mishra, additional secretary in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, of the contraceptive Depot medroxyprogesterone acetate, or DMPA, which has been used in the private sector since 1993. Still, the method will be introduced gingerly, limited at first to select district hospitals and medical colleges and then expanded next year to hospitals throughout the country. Implanted contraceptives may follow.
“We want to be very careful,” Mr. Mishra said. “We don’t want to put a single step wrong.
”In the context of India’s recent history, it is no wonder officials have been risk-averse and advocates mistrustful. In 1975, the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi led an aggressive campaign, in some cases forcing young or childless men to undergo vasectomies to meet quotas. More than six million sterilizations were performed, ignitinga widespread protest movement.
More than a decade later, when India began exploring the public use of injectable contraceptives, activist groups filed cases with the country’s Supreme Court seeking to ban the drugs, contending that they had not been proved safe and could be used coercively.
The court forwarded the matter to India’s Drug Technical Advisory Board, which in 1995 allowed private use to continue but recommended against offering them in government clinics. The decision was not revisited for 20 years, even as use of the method became widespread in neighboring Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
Opponents contend that India’s health infrastructure is too weak to regulate use of the drugs, monitor side effects or ensure that patients have given informed consent. India’s government spends just over 1 percent of its gross domestic producton public health, compared with around 3 percent in Russia and China and 8 percent in the United States.
“Invariably these new methods are tried on women who have no infrastructure to fall back on, who have no other resources to go for private health care,” said Navsharan Singh, a senior program specialist at the International Development Research Center, which is financed by the government of Canada. She said the current plan, to deliver the drugs through major hospitals, improved the prospects for follow-up.
Some opposition is tinged with ideology, with critics tracing American support for population control back to a Cold War era when they say birth control was seen as a way to combat poverty and to stop the spread of Communism by curbing chronic poverty. Mohan Rao, a professor of social sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University and long time opponent of injectables, said the government would have introduced them years ago were it not for India’s “mass-based women’s organizations.” He added, “They had a clear analysis of what is imperialism and what imperialism does to populations in third-world countries.
”In 2010, K. Sujatha Rao, then the union secretary in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in the Congress-led government, recommended lifting the ban on injectable contraceptives. But she left her post shortly there after, she said, and “because of civil society pressure, when I left, the government didn’t push it at all.
The atmosphere around injectable contraceptives began to shift after Mr. Modi’s party took over in May 2014, and it gained momentum after the Chhattisgarh catastrophe, about six months later. Last year, “All the stars aligned,” said Dr. Jyoti Vajpayee, a gynecologist who oversees family planning programs here for the Gates Foundation
“This government has come back in a majority, so they can afford to take risks,” she said
She and others had long sought to convince officials that existing options — male and female sterilization, the pill, IUDs and condoms— were insufficient for millions of Indian women who marry in their late teens and spend years carrying back-to-back pregnancies.
Research has shown that, globally, 30 percent of maternal deaths and 10 percent of child deaths could be prevented if women spaced their pregnancies two years apart.
At a meeting in August, the Drug Technical Advisory Board recommended that DMPA be included in the family planning program, saying 20 years of private use and studies of similar drugs by the Indian Council for Medical Research had established that they were safe to introduce without a pilot program
Dr. C. N. Purandare, past president of the Federation of Obstetric and Gynecological Societies of India and a proponent of the drugs, praised the government for what he called “a bold step.”
Not that the traditional method is being phased out. . At a recent sterilization camp about 90 miles west of Delhi, a time-honoredsystem was chugging along.
The women here, many of whom had traveled from their villages, said that they were eager to go for “the operation,” and thatthe cash incentive of 1,400 rupees, about $20, had not affected their decision. They hadbeen urged on by outreach workers who had accompanied them to the camp, older women from their own villages.
These women are paid 1,000 rupees for eachpatient with two or fewer children who comes in for sterilization and 240 rupees for each patient with three or more. They admitted that there were drawbacks to sterilization, especially for young women who might someday want to have another child
“We have to tell them a lot of things to convince them,” said Sudesh Wati, 50
Young women often listen to the outreach workers
“After she spoke to me, I made up my mind that in today’s times, nobody wants more than two children,” said Krishna Yadav, 35, gesturing at an amiable gray-haired woman standing nearby. “She has been telling me this for the last two months
Asked about injectable contraceptives, the women mostly looked blank. They had never heard of them
In any case, said Lalit Sharma, a nurse who trains outreach workers, when a new methodcomes online, women will almost certainly accept it
“Whatever method it might be,” he said, “if the government implements it, they blindly trust it"
Sunday, 21 February 2016
MAHENDRAGARH, India — This is what family planning in India often looks like: Women in their 20s, mostly farmers’ wives, gather at dawn on the stairs of a district hospital. Hours later, a surgeon arrives. His time is short. He asks the women to sit in a row on the floor of the operating room and then, in operations lasting a few minutes apiece, uses a laparoscope to sever their fallopian tubes, ensuring they will never again bear a child.
For decades, India has relied on female sterilization as its primary mode of contraception, funding about four million tubal ligations every year, more than any other country. This year, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modiwill take a major step toward modernizing that system, introducing injectable contraceptives free of charge in government facilities. The World Health Organization recommends their use without restriction for women of child bearing age.
New birth control options have long been advocated by international organizations, among them the United States Agency for International Development and theBill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They say Indian women — often worn out, anemic and at higher risk of death because they bear children young and often — urgently need methods to delay or space pregnancies.
The number of lives touched by such policies is enormous and growing. India will soon surpass China as the world’s most populous nation, and by 2050 it is expected to gain 400 million new citizens, more than the population of the United StatesParadoxically, here in India, the keenest opposition to these newer methods of birth control— ones seen in the West as empowering women to control their fertility — has come from some women’s activist groups that distrust the safety of these methods and believe that profit-hungry Western pharmaceutical companies are pushing them. Despite growing evidence of the safety of the injectables and their increasingly widespread use across South Asia, these groups have continued to oppose them. And it is Mr. Modi’s socially conservative Bharatiya Janata Party that has broken with decades of resistance to injectables.
The shift in policy has come in part because the government is less concerned about opposition from civil society groups, most of them more closely aligned with the previous ruling party, the Indian National Congress. Officials were also spurred by a medical disaster in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, where 13 women died in 2014 after under going tubal ligation at a high-volume government “sterilization camp.”
“I thought it was incumbent on the government to provide it as a choice,” said C.K. Mishra, additional secretary in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, of the contraceptive Depot medroxyprogesterone acetate, or DMPA, which has been used in the private sector since 1993. Still, the method will be introduced gingerly, limited at first to select district hospitals and medical colleges and then expanded next year to hospitals throughout the country. Implanted contraceptives may follow.
“We want to be very careful,” Mr. Mishra said. “We don’t want to put a single step wrong.
”In the context of India’s recent history, it is no wonder officials have been risk-averse and advocates mistrustful. In 1975, the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi led an aggressive campaign, in some cases forcing young or childless men to undergo vasectomies to meet quotas. More than six million sterilizations were performed, ignitinga widespread protest movement.
More than a decade later, when India began exploring the public use of injectable contraceptives, activist groups filed cases with the country’s Supreme Court seeking to ban the drugs, contending that they had not been proved safe and could be used coercively.
The court forwarded the matter to India’s Drug Technical Advisory Board, which in 1995 allowed private use to continue but recommended against offering them in government clinics. The decision was not revisited for 20 years, even as use of the method became widespread in neighboring Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
Opponents contend that India’s health infrastructure is too weak to regulate use of the drugs, monitor side effects or ensure that patients have given informed consent. India’s government spends just over 1 percent of its gross domestic producton public health, compared with around 3 percent in Russia and China and 8 percent in the United States.
“Invariably these new methods are tried on women who have no infrastructure to fall back on, who have no other resources to go for private health care,” said Navsharan Singh, a senior program specialist at the International Development Research Center, which is financed by the government of Canada. She said the current plan, to deliver the drugs through major hospitals, improved the prospects for follow-up.
Some opposition is tinged with ideology, with critics tracing American support for population control back to a Cold War era when they say birth control was seen as a way to combat poverty and to stop the spread of Communism by curbing chronic poverty. Mohan Rao, a professor of social sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University and long time opponent of injectables, said the government would have introduced them years ago were it not for India’s “mass-based women’s organizations.” He added, “They had a clear analysis of what is imperialism and what imperialism does to populations in third-world countries.
”In 2010, K. Sujatha Rao, then the union secretary in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in the Congress-led government, recommended lifting the ban on injectable contraceptives. But she left her post shortly there after, she said, and “because of civil society pressure, when I left, the government didn’t push it at all.
The atmosphere around injectable contraceptives began to shift after Mr. Modi’s party took over in May 2014, and it gained momentum after the Chhattisgarh catastrophe, about six months later. Last year, “All the stars aligned,” said Dr. Jyoti Vajpayee, a gynecologist who oversees family planning programs here for the Gates Foundation
“This government has come back in a majority, so they can afford to take risks,” she said
She and others had long sought to convince officials that existing options — male and female sterilization, the pill, IUDs and condoms— were insufficient for millions of Indian women who marry in their late teens and spend years carrying back-to-back pregnancies.
Research has shown that, globally, 30 percent of maternal deaths and 10 percent of child deaths could be prevented if women spaced their pregnancies two years apart.
At a meeting in August, the Drug Technical Advisory Board recommended that DMPA be included in the family planning program, saying 20 years of private use and studies of similar drugs by the Indian Council for Medical Research had established that they were safe to introduce without a pilot program
Dr. C. N. Purandare, past president of the Federation of Obstetric and Gynecological Societies of India and a proponent of the drugs, praised the government for what he called “a bold step.”
Not that the traditional method is being phased out. . At a recent sterilization camp about 90 miles west of Delhi, a time-honoredsystem was chugging along.
The women here, many of whom had traveled from their villages, said that they were eager to go for “the operation,” and thatthe cash incentive of 1,400 rupees, about $20, had not affected their decision. They hadbeen urged on by outreach workers who had accompanied them to the camp, older women from their own villages.
These women are paid 1,000 rupees for eachpatient with two or fewer children who comes in for sterilization and 240 rupees for each patient with three or more. They admitted that there were drawbacks to sterilization, especially for young women who might someday want to have another child
“We have to tell them a lot of things to convince them,” said Sudesh Wati, 50
Young women often listen to the outreach workers
“After she spoke to me, I made up my mind that in today’s times, nobody wants more than two children,” said Krishna Yadav, 35, gesturing at an amiable gray-haired woman standing nearby. “She has been telling me this for the last two months
Asked about injectable contraceptives, the women mostly looked blank. They had never heard of them
In any case, said Lalit Sharma, a nurse who trains outreach workers, when a new methodcomes online, women will almost certainly accept it
“Whatever method it might be,” he said, “if the government implements it, they blindly trust it"
Sunday, 21 February 2016
Tropical Cyclone Winston batters Fiji
Fiji - The most powerful storm on record in the Southern Hemisphere slammed straight into Fiji late Saturday, delivering the first crushing blows of a pounding that is expected to last for days on the tiny island nation.
The Joint Typhoon Warning Center estimated Tropical Cyclone Winston's winds reached 184 mph in the hours before it made landfall about 7 p.m. Saturday (2 a.m. ET).
"Winston was a monster of a cyclone," Fiji resident Nazeem Kasim told CNN. "I have not experienced anythinglike this before in my life, nor has my 60-year-old father.
"The worst of the storm then went back out to sea, but only after wreaking havoc on the tourist hot spot with heavy flooding, rain and damaging winds. It could still end up hitting the South Pacific nation even more over the comingdays.
The Fiji Broadcasting Corp. reported that an elderly man was killed when a roof fell on him.There are no other reports of other fatalities, and the full extent of the damage "is yet to be ascertained," according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The government announced on Twitter that more than 750evacuation centers had been activated.Photos shared on social media with the hashtag#PrayForFiji showed an idyllic paradise beset by flooded streets, roofless houses and downed palm trees."It was an awful night with trees coming down," said resident Alice Clements of Suva, communications specialist for UNICEF in the Pacific.
"Everywhere I look, it looks like trees are down."Clements said photos showed "Nothing is standing," she said.
"Things have been flattened."Fears of mudslides, coastal inundation Fiji, an archipelago collectively about the size of New Jersey, lies in the South Pacific Ocean some 1,800 miles from Australia's east coast (by comparison, Hawaii is about 2,500 miles from Los Angeles).
Most of the nation's 900,000 residents live on one of two main islands: Viti Levu or Vanua Levu.Although not hit directly, the capital of Suva endured"damaging gale force winds, heavy rain and power outages.
The Red Cross said it was "fully prepared and on standby.""We are well-organized and prepared," said Eseroma Ledua, operations manager at the Fiji Red Cross.
"We have prepositioned relief items sufficient for 12,000 people in our headquarters in Suva and have mobilized over 300 staff and volunteers across our 14 branches nationwide.
"Widespread flash flooding and coastal inundation -- flooding in normally dry land -- "is likely as storm surges may push the sea inland several hundred meters," the Red Cross said.Mudslides are a concern.
"This is a mountainous nation, and that means any heavy rainfall will filter down to the lower elevations -- meaning landslides, mudslides.
The western city of Nadi, on Fiji's main island, suffered minor wind damage but experienced extensive flooding, reported a television team from CNN affiliate TVNZ.
"You could hear things blowing around outside and even inside air got through the cracks and some things were blowing around my room," reporter Jessica Mutch said. Many trees were uprooted.
"You can really see that the infrastructure is not coping with the volume of water and things are getting blocked up," she said.
A nation wide curfew remained in effect and all flights were canceled.Fiji PM: 'we must stick together' Had it occurred in the Atlantic, Winston would have been a Category 5 hurricane, but because of hemispheric nomenclature, it's dubbed a cyclone. (In the Northwest Pacific, it would be a typhoon; all three are the same weather phenomenon).
No matter what you call it, Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama had his own name for it: an "assault.""As a nation, we are facing an ordeal of the most grievous kind," Bainimarama said.
"We must stick together as a people and look after each other. "Bainimarama, who said that the government is "thoroughly prepared to deal with this crisis," declared a state of emergency that will be in effect for the next 30 days, according to the Fiji TimesAccording to CNN meteorologist Allison Chinchar, while Winston weakened as it moved over land -- as these typesof storms do -- it has since reintensified, and with the El Niño-warmed water serving as fuel, Winston's eye has reformed.
CNN meteorologist Michael Guy said Winston is expected to "keep strength as it continues on its path in open waters," but said "it will weaken Tuesday or Wednesday once it hits cooler waters and stronger shear."Winston's 184 mph winds smashed the previous record for a Southern Hemisphere cyclone.
According to Colorado State University hurricane expert Philip Klotzbach, both Cyclone Zoe, which battered the Solomon Islands in 2002, and Cyclone Monica, which walloped Australia in 2006, previously shared the record with their estimated winds of 178 mph.
The most powerful such storm on record in any hemisphere was Hurricane Patricia, which was estimated to have hit 200 mph before petering out over southwestern Mexico in October
source of : CNN
Sunday, 21 February 2016
Why Is Mitch McConnell Picking This Fight?
This is also the best way to understand Mr. McConnell’s staunch opposition to the president: It is less about blocking liberal policy goals than about boosting Republican chances. Mr. McConnell intuited, shrewdly, that if he could bottle things up in Washington with the filibuster and other tactics, the blame for the gridlock would fall mostly to the Democrats — the party in the White House. Not to mention that Mr. Obama had campaigned on the promise of transcending Washington’s divides, which made partisan dysfunction look like a personal failure.
There was an obvious cost to this approach. Withholding any support for President Obama’s agenda meant giving up the chance for more policy concessions on big issues like health care and financial reform. But for Mr. McConnell, shaping policy wasn’t the goal. Winning was. When he said, notoriously, just before the 2010 election that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” it was less an expression of personal animosity than it was a simple reflection of the permanent campaign ethos.
Another cost to this approach became apparent only later. Withholding any votes from Obama’s big proposals meant, by definition, that the Democrats ended up forcing them through on party line votes, which further inflamed the grass-roots conservative backlash to the president. This backlash helped Republicans win in 2010 and 2014, but it also left Mr. McConnell with an empowered right wing, led by the likes of Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Ted Cruz of Texas, that was deeply wary of this onetime moderate with weak ideological moorings. Sometimes, Mr. McConnell could use this right wing to his benefit — warning the White House, for instance, that it had better accede to Republican demands on the debt ceiling in 2011 lest the renegades take the country to default.
More often, though, these self-described revolutionaries confounded him, which led to explosions of frustration like the one that a longtime associate witnessed in 2011: “He said, ‘Those idiots, those people come up here and have never been in office and know nothing about being in office.’ ”
Such outbursts were kept under wraps, of course. Mr. McConnell needed to appease enough of the chaos makers in order to stay atop the Republican caucus, and to overcome a Tea Party Republican challenger leading up to his 2014 re-election.
He managed to do so, and finally attained his goal of becoming majority leader. He made initial overtures to Mr. Obama about finding common ground in areas like trade policy. But soon enough, the focus turned back toward the next election, 2016. Republicans now have seven Senate seats to defend in states that the president carried in 2012.
Justice Scalia’s death has greatly complicated Mr. McConnell’s election-year plans. Remarkably, he has, for once, chosen a path that would seem to reduce his party’s odds in November.
Unlike 2009 and 2010, when his opposition took the form of procedural delays, Mr. McConnell is taking a high-profile stand. Had he instead allowed the nomination process to proceed and bog down in more gridlock, the outrage quotient among Democrats would have remained lower and his prospects for retaining the majority higher.
The likeliest explanation is that the insurgency that Mr. McConnell helped engender has gotten so strong, embodied in the rise of Donald J. Trump and Ted Cruz, that it has caused him to lose his bearings. He felt compelled to get out in front of the base’s ire over the Scalia replacement to avoid a later challenge to his leadership perch.
It is also possible, though, that in the Supreme Court’s balance, in particular in relation to campaign finance law, Mr. McConnell has at long last discovered one matter that is so consequential that it is worth risking an election over.
Sunday, 21 February 2016
E.U. Deal Clears Path for British Referendum on Membership
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain arriving Friday for the second day of a European Union summit meeting in Brussels.
BRUSSELS - European Union leaders agreed on Friday to a deal to overhaul their ties with Britain, opening the way for a high-stakes referendum on whether the bloc’s most ambivalent member country will stay within the union or quit.
After hours of tense talks, all 28 European Union leaders signed off on an agreement covering a variety of issues related to sovereignty, economics and migration, and intended to help keep skeptical Britons within the European Union when they vote on the matter, almost certainly in June.
“I believe this is enough for me to recommend that the United Kingdom remain in the European Union,” said Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain after reaching the agreement at a summit meeting in Brussels, adding that the deal ensured both “special status” for his country and that “Britain will never be part of a European superstate.”
The referendum would be a “once-in-a-generation moment to shape the destiny of our country,” Mr. Cameron added.
Other leaders welcomed the agreement, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who said the union had given a package to Mr. Cameron “that will enable him to elicit support in Britain for Britain remaining a member of the European Union.
Mr. Cameron plans to hold a cabinet meeting on Saturday morning and is expected to hold the referendum on June 23. But the divisions within his Conservative Party were underlined by reports that a friend and cabinet colleague, Michael Gove, will campaign to leave the union, a decision that Mr. Cameron said left him “disappointed but not surprised.”
And even after the agreement, the referendum represents a huge gamble because a no vote would have huge ramifications for Europe, as well as for Britain.
Already contending with a record influx of migrants and a weak economic outlook, European leaders are desperate to avoid a British exit, or “Brexit,” which would plunge the bloc into a new crisis, adding to uncertainty about its future.
Nevertheless, the wrangling went on for about 30 hours because some of Mr. Cameron’s requests called into question fundamental principles that have evolved over years of integration in the European Union, such as the members’ commitment to a closer union, the freedom of its citizens to work and live throughout the bloc and their right to equal treatment.
The referendum has been billed by Mr. Cameron as the moment to settle whether Britain should remain a member of the club it joined more than four decades ago. That relationship has become increasingly neuralgic amid concerns about bureaucratic meddling by European policy makers.
In 2013, under pressure from right-wing euroskeptics in his own party, Mr. Cameron promised to call a referendum by the end of 2017, but said he first wanted to renegotiate British ties so he could recommend a vote to stay.
His demands tested the good will of other European partners in the negotiations, which started Thursday and stretched late into Friday night.
Ultimately, he appeared to win most of the battles he had fought over a draft agreement, though this is unlikely to impress euroskeptics.
Among the most delicate concessions Mr. Cameron secured was a mechanism to restrict the welfare supplements for citizens from other European Union countries who arrive in Britain, a benefit that is ordinarily available to people in low-paid jobs. There will also be changes to reduce the child benefit payments to non-British workers who come to Britain.
Mr. Cameron also secured guarantees that Britain’s financial sector will not face discrimination because the British have kept the pound and have no intention of adopting the single European currency, the euro.
He also achieved his demand to exempt Britain from the largely symbolic pledge to pursue “ever closer union,” which for some euroskeptics encapsulates the pursuit of a federal Europe that would supersede the nation-state. When the bloc’s treaty is next revised, it will be made clear that Britain is no longer bound by this obligation.
Ms. Merkel described this as “an emotional issue,” adding that she had agreed to the concession “in the spirit of compromise.”
As if those issues were not complicated enough, talks proved more difficult than expected, partly because efforts to negotiate a compromise were delayed as European leaders took time to debate migration, their other pressing concern.
The overlapping threats facing the bloc were underlined on Friday by suggestions that the Greeks might block the meeting’s concluding document if they did not receive reassurances that European states would not shut borders to stop migrants from moving northward.
Mr. Cameron’s deal initially was to be approved at an “English breakfast,” but it was delayed first to brunch, then to the afternoon and then to an “English dinner.” By early Saturday, the remaining differences were hammered out.
Always an awkward European partner, Britain joined the forerunner of the European Union in 1973 after more than a decade of trying. Even then membership was controversial, and after he came to power in 1974, the Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, held a referendum in 1975 on whether Britain should stay in what was then called the European Economic Community.
Had Britain voted to leave at that point, its departure would have had relatively few implications because its membership was so new. But now, Britain is much more deeply integrated into myriad Europewide agreements in areas like international trade, climate protection and subsidies for farmers hashed out in Brussels, not London.
Among Europeans, Britons are among the least enthusiastic about membership of the bloc, according to opinion surveys. Britain is a net contributor to the European Union’s budget. In the 1970s, the British economy was stagnant, while continental Europe made gains, but that situation is now reversed.
The bloc’s long battle to save the eurozone from imploding in recent years, and its failure to craft a unified response to the migration crisis, has made the European Union look even less attractive to many Britons.
Although few of the migrants arriving in Europe during the past year have made their way to Britain, immigration still is a contentious issue because Britain saw a large influx of workers from Central and Eastern Europe after countries like Poland joined the bloc in 2004.
At the time, the government could have kept its labor market closed for several years — as countries such as France and Germany did — but elected not to.
Sunday, 21 February 2016
Francis and Trump: Populist Leaders Preaching Divergent Messages
Francis and Trump: Populist Leaders Preaching Divergent Messages
ROME — In the cage fight of American presidential politics, the matchup is irresistible: Pope Francis, leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, the pope of the poor who has knelt to wash the feet of prisoners and Muslims, versus Donald J. Trump, billionaire Republican who disparages Muslims and kneels to no one.
When Francis suggested that Mr. Trump “is not Christian” in answering a reporter’s question during his return flight from Mexico, the Latin American pope not only served up red meat for global headline writers (“Francis Excommunicates Trump,” declared La Stampa in Italy), but again demonstrated his knack for sticking his nose into putatively secular affairs. His flap with Mr. Trump is about immigration, and to Francis the issue transcends any campaign cycle.
From the first days of his papacy, when he insisted on paying his hotel bill himself, Francis has understood the power of a gesture, and of a global spotlight available to any pope capable of using it. The pontiff who made a politically charged visit to the United States-Mexico border on Wednesday is the same one who in 2014 stopped in Bethlehem to pray at the graffiti-covered wall dividing the Palestinian city from Israeli-controlled Jerusalem.
His critics in the United States, many of them conservative Catholics, argue that Francis is a “political pope” pursuing a leftist agenda that castigates capitalism and environmental degradation. Even before Francis’s remarks about him, Mr. Trump had criticized the pope as “a political person” and accused him of visiting the border as a favor to the Mexican government.
That would probably be a surprise to the Mexican government, judging from Francis’s six-day swing through the country. Every day, Francis spoke of the malaise in Mexican society, the lack of jobs and education for the young, the horrific violence of the drug cartels. His itinerary was a tour of political failure and social injustice: slums, the heartland of exploited indigenous communities and a divided border
The Francis-versus-Trump dynamic is undeniably a made-for-media clash. But overlooked in that frame is that each man has diagnosed the same currents in society, fishing for followers in seas churning with anger, dislocation, spiritual alienation and economic inequality. Seen from Europe, Mr. Trump is an amplified version of angry populists like Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader in France, playing to fears about migrants, Islam and economic stagnation.
“Trump is the leader of a populism that’s growing: a cultural industry that has imitators in many countries in Eastern Europe, above all, but also in France, Italy, Denmark, Scandinavia,” Massimo Franco, a columnist for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, wrote on Friday.
“It expresses a resentment and hatred towards the ‘foreigner’ born of fear and economic insecurity,” Mr. Franco added. “Trump becomes the metaphor of an egotistical and racist Christianity, which for the pope represents an unacceptable oxymoron.”
Giovanni Maria Vian, the editor in chief of the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, said every pope was “both religious and political.” Pope John Paul II was a famously political pope for his role during the Cold War in bringing down the Iron Curtain that divided East from West. Francis, born in Argentina, has a different focus.
“Francis’s walls are between the north and south of the world, and that’s why they bother him,” Mr. Vian said in a telephone interview. “His reactions are moral, not political.”
Yet he has inevitably strayed into the political realm, as he critiques society, and no doubt deliberately. While populists like Mr. Trump and Ms. Le Pen partly blame foreigners for inequities, Francis points to structural inequities deriving from the global capitalist order. His speeches about the excesses of capitalism, often sprinkled with Old Testament fury, divide the world between exploiters and the exploited.
“God will hold the slave drivers of our day accountable,” Francis said in a speech to workers and business owners in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as he called for greater Christian ethics in business. “The flow of capital cannot decide the flow and life of people.”
ROME — In the cage fight of American presidential politics, the matchup is irresistible: Pope Francis, leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, the pope of the poor who has knelt to wash the feet of prisoners and Muslims, versus Donald J. Trump, billionaire Republican who disparages Muslims and kneels to no one.
When Francis suggested that Mr. Trump “is not Christian” in answering a reporter’s question during his return flight from Mexico, the Latin American pope not only served up red meat for global headline writers (“Francis Excommunicates Trump,” declared La Stampa in Italy), but again demonstrated his knack for sticking his nose into putatively secular affairs. His flap with Mr. Trump is about immigration, and to Francis the issue transcends any campaign cycle.
From the first days of his papacy, when he insisted on paying his hotel bill himself, Francis has understood the power of a gesture, and of a global spotlight available to any pope capable of using it. The pontiff who made a politically charged visit to the United States-Mexico border on Wednesday is the same one who in 2014 stopped in Bethlehem to pray at the graffiti-covered wall dividing the Palestinian city from Israeli-controlled Jerusalem.
His critics in the United States, many of them conservative Catholics, argue that Francis is a “political pope” pursuing a leftist agenda that castigates capitalism and environmental degradation. Even before Francis’s remarks about him, Mr. Trump had criticized the pope as “a political person” and accused him of visiting the border as a favor to the Mexican government.
That would probably be a surprise to the Mexican government, judging from Francis’s six-day swing through the country. Every day, Francis spoke of the malaise in Mexican society, the lack of jobs and education for the young, the horrific violence of the drug cartels. His itinerary was a tour of political failure and social injustice: slums, the heartland of exploited indigenous communities and a divided border
The Francis-versus-Trump dynamic is undeniably a made-for-media clash. But overlooked in that frame is that each man has diagnosed the same currents in society, fishing for followers in seas churning with anger, dislocation, spiritual alienation and economic inequality. Seen from Europe, Mr. Trump is an amplified version of angry populists like Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader in France, playing to fears about migrants, Islam and economic stagnation.
“Trump is the leader of a populism that’s growing: a cultural industry that has imitators in many countries in Eastern Europe, above all, but also in France, Italy, Denmark, Scandinavia,” Massimo Franco, a columnist for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, wrote on Friday.
“It expresses a resentment and hatred towards the ‘foreigner’ born of fear and economic insecurity,” Mr. Franco added. “Trump becomes the metaphor of an egotistical and racist Christianity, which for the pope represents an unacceptable oxymoron.”
Giovanni Maria Vian, the editor in chief of the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, said every pope was “both religious and political.” Pope John Paul II was a famously political pope for his role during the Cold War in bringing down the Iron Curtain that divided East from West. Francis, born in Argentina, has a different focus.
“Francis’s walls are between the north and south of the world, and that’s why they bother him,” Mr. Vian said in a telephone interview. “His reactions are moral, not political.”
Yet he has inevitably strayed into the political realm, as he critiques society, and no doubt deliberately. While populists like Mr. Trump and Ms. Le Pen partly blame foreigners for inequities, Francis points to structural inequities deriving from the global capitalist order. His speeches about the excesses of capitalism, often sprinkled with Old Testament fury, divide the world between exploiters and the exploited.
“God will hold the slave drivers of our day accountable,” Francis said in a speech to workers and business owners in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as he called for greater Christian ethics in business. “The flow of capital cannot decide the flow and life of people.”
More
than anyone, Mr. Trump symbolizes the excesses of capitalism, yet
Vatican officials on Friday emphasized that the pope was not personally
attacking Mr. Trump, nor trying to influence American voters.
“The
pope said what we all know, when we follow his teaching and his views:
that we should not build walls but bridges,” a Vatican spokesman, the
Rev. Federico Lombardi, told Vatican Radio. “It’s his general position,
and it is coherent with what it means to courageously follow the
indications of the Gospel, of acceptance and solidarity.”
Indeed,
the pope’s overarching message is to call on all Christians to be more
Christian, including those high up in the hierarchy of the Roman
Catholic Church. He has repeatedly challenged his own bishops to be
humbler, to get out onto the streets and to be more compassionate. His
economic critique is also a moral one, as he laments a “throwaway
culture” in which poor people and migrants are collateral damage. By
contrast, Mr. Trump likes to divvy people up as winners and losers.
In
his final Mass celebrated along the Mexican border, Francis told the
biblical story of the city of Nineveh, which was “self-destructing as a
result of oppression and dishonor, violence and injustice.” God sent a
messenger, Jonah, to warn people and the local king that they must
change how they treat one another or the city would be destroyed. The
king listened, and Ninevah was saved.
“He sent him to wake up a people intoxicated with themselves,” Francis said.
It is hard not think that Francis sees his job as exactly the same.
Sunday, 21 February 2016
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