Ciudad Juarez’s Grim Milestone: 6,000 dead

Posted on November 7, 2010 by abby

REUTERS– The daily killings have become so normal they have almost ceased to shock. Unless Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas, bucks all previous indicators and undergoes a dramatic security turnaround, the death toll from the drug war raging in the city since January 2008 will reach 6,000 people this month.

That is more than all the dead serving in the U.S.military in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. It is also a tragic milestone reached with the killings of mostly teenage hitmen, police, drug addicts, dealers and people who failed to cough up extortion money and kidnap ransoms.

The grim tally underlines a harsh decline for Ciudad Juarez, which was hailed in the 1990s as the poster child for free trade, the city that through the North American Free Trade Agreement was meant to bring prosperity and stability via its border factories exporting dishwashers and televisions to the United States. The Ciudad Juarez-El Paso region did handle $50 billion in trade in 2008, but little of that wealth stayed in Ciudad Juarez.

Federal police told Reuters last month that drug killings had fallen since they took over security in the city in April. But nothing seems to be further from the truth. According to tallies at the respected Ciudad Juarez daily El Diario, June was the bloodiest month yet with 306 deaths and July could surpass that total, with more than 130 deaths over the past 13 days.

Read full article HERE.

South African Doctor Invents Female Condoms With ‘Teeth’ to Fight Rape

Posted on June 25, 2010 by abby

CNN– South African Dr. Sonnet Ehlers was on call one night four decades ago when a devastated rape victim walked in. Her eyes were lifeless; she was like a breathing corpse.

“She looked at me and said, ‘If only I had teeth down there,'” recalled Ehlers, who was a 20-year-old medical researcher at the time. “I promised her I’d do something to help people like her one day.”

Forty years later, Rape-aXe was born. Ehlers is distributing the female condoms in the various South African cities where the World Cup soccer games are taking place.

The woman inserts the latex condom like a tampon. Jagged rows of teeth-like hooks line its inside and attach on a man’s penis during penetration, Ehlers said. Once it lodges, only a doctor can remove it – a procedure Ehlers hopes will be done with authorities on standby to make an arrest.

Continue reading about the Female Rape Condom.

Gaza Blockade Isn’t About Security

Posted on June 10, 2010 by abby

MCCLATCHY– As Israel ordered a slight easing of its blockade of the Gaza Strip Wednesday, McClatchy obtained an Israeli government document that describes the blockade not as a security measure but as “economic warfare” against the Islamist group Hamas, which rules the Palestinian territory.

Israel imposed severe restrictions on Gaza in June 2007, after Hamas won elections and took control of the coastal enclave after winning elections there the previous year, and the government has long said that the aim of the blockade is to stem the flow of weapons to militants in Gaza.

Last week, after Israeli commandos killed nine volunteers on a Turkish-organized Gaza aid flotilla, Israel again said its aim was to stop the flow of terrorist arms into Gaza.

However, in response to a lawsuit by Gisha, an Israeli human rights group, the Israeli government explained the blockade as an exercise of the right of economic warfare.

“A country has the right to decide that it chooses not to engage in economic relations or to give economic assistance to the other party to the conflict, or that it wishes to operate using ‘economic warfare,'” the government said.

McClatchy obtained the government’s written statement from Gisha, the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, which sued the government for information about the blockade. The Israeli high court upheld the suit, and the government delivered its statement earlier this year.

Sari Bashi, the director of Gisha, said the documents prove that Israel isn’t imposing its blockade for its stated reasons, but rather as collective punishment for the Palestinian population of Gaza. Gisha focuses on Palestinian rights.

(A State Department spokesman, who wasn’t authorized to speak for the record, said he hadn’t seen the documents in question.)

The Israeli government took an additional step Wednesday and said the economic warfare is intended to achieve a political goal. A government spokesman, who couldn’t be named as a matter of policy, told McClatchy that authorities will continue to ease the blockade but “could not lift the embargo altogether as long as Hamas remains in control” of Gaza.

Read full article on the Gaza Blockade Not Being About Security.

Frenkel, a McClatchy special correspondent, reported from Jerusalem. Warren P. Strobel and Steven Thomma contributed to this article from Washington.

Drug War Violence Sweeps Mexican Border

Posted on May 11, 2010 by abby

RAW STORY– Mexico’s bloody drug wars saw a new spasm of killings late Saturday into Sunday, with 25 people fatally shot in the northern state of Chihuahua bordering the United States. Seven of the deaths occurred in violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s murder capital, bringing to 62 the number of people killed in the city over the past week.

The 18 other slayings overnight included four people fatally shot by automatic weapons fire in a bar in the town of Camargo, near the state capital Chihuahua City, and two women whose bodies were found stuffed in the trunk of an abandoned car in the same town, prosecutors said.

So far this year, more than 850 people have been killed in Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million, while more than 2,660 were killed there in 2009, according to official figures.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon visited Ciudad Juarez in February and apologized to numerous grieving families who lost loved ones in a January massacre that claimed the lives of 15 children and teens. The president admitted that his three-year crackdown on crime with more than 50,000 troops spread across the country “is not enough,” and vowed to redesign a new strategy against crime and violence with community cooperation.

To the east in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey early Sunday, three men and two women were trampled to death when some 10,000 people at an outdoor concert stampeded after three shots were fired, presumably in the air, by somebody at the fairground, local officials said.

Another 30 people were treated for injuries from the jostling, they added. Moments before the gunshots, the crowd appears to have been primed for panic when shouts “hit the ground” and “gunfight” were heard, witnesses told the Mexican newspaper Reforma. Monterrey, in Nuevo Laredo state that also borders the United States, has seen a spike in gang violence pitting the Guf of Mexico and Los Zetas drug cartels, officials said.

Read full article about Drug War Violence Sweeps Mexican Border.

Israel Celebrates Irgun Hotel Bombing

Posted on April 3, 2010 by abby

TELEGRAPH– In the midst of its campaign against Hizbollah and Hamas “terrorists”, Israel has been accused by Britain of feting Jewish “terrorists” whose bomb attack killed 28 Britons 60 years ago today.

The accusation, which reopens the debate about the use of politically-inspired violence in the region, follows the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the attack on the King David hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, by the Irgun Jewish “resistance” to British mandate rule in Palestine. The 28 Britons were among 91 people killed.

This week, former Irgun fighters and current Right-wing politicians unveiled the plaque at the hotel, which read: “The hotel housed the Mandate Secretariat as well as the Army Headquarters. On July 22, 1946, Irgun fighters at the order of the Hebrew Resistance Movement planted explosives in the basement. Warning phone calls had been made urging the hotel’s occupants to leave immediately. For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated and after 25 minutes the bombs exploded, and to the Irgun’s regret and dismay 91 persons were killed.”

But Israel’s celebration of its “freedom fighters” remains highly controversial at a time when it continues to pound Palestinian “terrorists”.

Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, has found herself deeply embroiled in the debate – her father, Eitan, was Irgun’s chief operations officer. Simon Macdonald, the British ambassador to Israel, and consul general John Jenkins, wrote to the mayor of Jerusalem protesting at the plaque. “We don’t think it’s right for an act of terrorism to be commemorated,” their letter read.