[Khartoum, Sudan; November 18. Image via Getty]

An Algerian football fan cheers for her team ahead of the 2010 World Cup qualification play-off between Egypt and Algeria in Khartoum on November 18, 2009. Sudan's security forces threw a tight security cordon around Khartoum to prevent violence between fans of Algeria and Egypt, who will clash for a place at the football World Cup finals. AFP PHOTO/KHALED DESOUKI (Photo credit should read KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images)

The abuse reportedly started in the 1970s when the victim was only 11 and continued to the present day. The unidentified man's wife says she "never suspected" her husband was abusing their daughter. • In response to the arrest and imprisonment of a journalist in Sudan for wearing trousers, Egypt's top Islamic authority has said that he is cool with women wearing pants. However, he is not a fan of "stretch" pants, which he deems "unacceptable." • Raymond Clark III was charged with the murder of Yale grad student Annie Le today, and Le's fiance issued a statement thanking people who were involved in preparations for "a wedding that was not to be." • A 23-year-old British student who was sexually assaulted in her apartment in India broke down recently in court while the defense lawyer was questioning her. He asked her whether she bathed, and whether she drank or smoke. She said she was humiliated by his questions, and found testifying almost as traumatic as the original assault. • Perhaps unsurprisingly, a study found that if one spouse smoked or drank heavily and the other did not, the relationship was more likely to deteriorate than if both engaged in the behavior. • Yesterday the Yemeni government defended their attempts to halt child marriages in a written statement. They cited a law introduced to parliament in February that would have set the minimum marriage age at 17, but did not pass due to conservative opposition. • A report released by the CDC indicates that 1 in 3 girls aged 13-17 has received the Gardasil cervical cancer vaccine. The report also notes that vaccination varies dramatically state by state, with Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi falling far behind. • A 65-year-old man named Abraham Kortotki won the $20,982 first prize at an Atlantic City casino's ladies poker tournament. Unsurprisingly, some women are miffed, especially second-place finisher Nicole Rowe, who intended to use the cash to help recover from a mastectomy. • Now that the Hofstra University freshman who had accused five men of gang-raping her recanted her statement, Amanda Hess has written am interesting piece on rape culture. A snippet: "Rape culture does not only tell men to assert ownership over whichever female body they desire. Rape culture also tells women not to claim ownership over their own bodies. Rape culture also informs women that they should not desire sex. Rape culture also tells women that saying yes makes them bad women." • Surprise, surprise: Teen birth rates are highest in the most religious states. More here, here and here. • Want to wash all this bad news from your mind? Pictures of fishing cats!

• Researchers have found that the children born to mothers that have undergone weight loss surgery are healthier than older siblings born before the procedure. The younger siblings were found to have improved heart health and a lower risk of obesity. • A Sudanese judge has ruled that journalist Lubna Hussein, who was arrested in July for wearing pants, will not be flogged (flogging is a legal punishment for indecency). Hussein is still facing a $200 fine, which she is not planning on paying. "I will not pay a penny. I won't pay, as a matter of principle," she said. •  Health workers at a clinic in rural Peru were frustrated at the low rate of births taking place inside the clinic (only 6%), and so they decided to ask local women what they were doing wrong. The mothers were happy to help. The clinic will now respect traditional practices, ensure that they have a doctor on hand who speaks the local language, and allow relatives to stay and help with the birthing process. • Celebrity polar bear Knut is getting a new pal: Giovanna, a female polar bear from Munich. However, since both bears are not yet sexually mature, there is little chance they will consummate their relationship. • Scientists are attempting to pin down gender differences in brain function, yet even the study of the brain does not provide an easy way out of the "old nature/nurture dilemma." What they found is something many have long suspected: "Individuals' gender traits-their preference for masculine or feminine clothes, careers, hobbies and interpersonal styles-are inevitably shaped more by rearing and experience than is their biological sex." • Al Franken has a cool party trick, which he recently displayed at the Minnesota State Fair. Click here for a video of Franken drawing the entire US map from memory. • Women in Australia are in luck: the Bluetongue Brewery plans to hire 10 to 15 professional beer tasters in the next year. And since women apparently make better tasters, they are looking for boozy broads to fill the open positions. • This weekend, Linda Rice became the first woman to win a training title at Saratoga. Rice has been training since 1987, but this is the first time she has taken home a title. • An op-ed from this Sunday's New York Times argues that the cyberbullying laws under which Lori Drew was tried are "too vague to be constitutional." • The mayor of German border town Vierlinden has announced plans to deter prostitutes from gathering on the B1 motorway through the use of butyric acid, which apparently smells like vomit and body odor. • In October 2007, Afghan journalist Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh was jailed for blasphemy after she was caught downloading an internet article about women's rights. A few weeks ago, President Hamid Karzai finally pardoned Kambakhsh, and she has since been freed. • The Justice Department is urging a Santa Ana court to toss out a lawsuit that challenges President Obama's Constitutional qualifications to be president. The birthers' suit claims that Obama was not born in Hawaii and is a citizen of Indonesia, and "possibly still citizen of Kenya." • A Jewish community leader has condemned the AIDS awareness ad that features a man intended to represent Hitler in the throes of passion, saying that it both unsuccessful and offensive. We agree. • Feministing features an interesting video about gender and language. The Hariri Foundation introduced a program that replaced words that are generally read as masculine with accents that mark them as feminine. More here. • As of today, Girl Scouts will now be able to earn a new patch for "preparedness." "This new preparedness patch will increase citizen preparedness and enhance our country's readiness for disasters," said Homeland Security Department Secretary Janet Napolitano. • Farmers in India are facing increasing hardships as crops fail and debts pile up, which has caused many impovrished farmers to take the drastic measure of selling their wives. According to some reports, as many as several thousand men have sold their wives to money lenders, who then transfer the marriage contract to a third party. •

[Khartoum, Sudan; August 4. Image via Getty]

Sudanese journalist Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, who faces 40 lashes for wearing trousers, waves to the crowd outside the court in Khartoum upon her arrival for a hearing on August 4, 2009. The judge decided to delay her trial to September 7 to determine whether Hussein, who also works with the United Nations, has legal immunity, defence lawyer Jalal al-Sayyid said. The Sudanese woman, who is in her 30s, has been charged with public indecency after she was arrested last month along with 12 other women who were wearing trousers at a Khartoum restaurant. AFP /PHOTO /ASHRAF SHAZLY (Photo credit should read ASHRAF SHAZLY/AFP/Getty Images)

She writes:

The evidence the prosecutor has presented is clear and compelling. Millions of people have been displaced; hundreds of thousands have been killed and, at the center of it all stands Sudanese President Omar al Bashir who has been indicted on seven counts of war crimes and five counts of crimes against humanity.

One of those crimes, in fact, is the use of rape as a weapon of genocide, which is the laws first use.

Jolie also talks about what continues to happen at the world's attention ebbs and flows from Darfur.

More than 250,000 people from Darfur have lived destitute lives in refugee camps in Chad for six years now. Camps with more than two million internally displaced persons inside Darfur are even worse. Thirty percent of those displaced are school-age children. Girls leaving the camps are raped; boys leaving the camps are killed.

The problem, of course, is that we haven't seen fit to do terribly much about it.

The U.N. Security Council, Jolie says, can choose to intervene after the prosecutor's presentation, or it can sit idly by and allow Bashir to continue killing his own people and thumbing his nose at the international community.

According to the UN Charter, the Security Council exists "to promote the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security." If the results of the Darfur investigation which they ordered don't merit their active engagement, what does?

Today the Security Council member states will be faced with a simple decision - to embrace impunity or to end it.

As they are considering Bashir's fate they are also considering their own.

They are also considering the future of all the residents of Darfur, who Bashir continues to attempt to exterminate.

The Case Against Omar Al Bashir [Time]

Earlier: Darfur: When Assault Becomes A Case For Genocide

• Barack Obama would like to sell you a new, fuel-efficient car with an underpriced voucher to save the auto industry. He'd prefer you buy American but probably can't make you. [Washington Post]

• He's also up in your federal lands, protecting your wilderness. The President doesn't speak LOLcat, though. [Washington Post]
• Which is likely why most people don't blame him for the shitty economy (yet). [Washington Post]
• He tried out his salesman skills on the Sudan by asking them to let aid workers back into Darfur. The Sudanese would prefer their citizens just die already, though. [NY Times]
• He is going to lift the travel ban on Cuba, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez be damned, because sanctions still haven't worked in lo these 47 years. [Washington Post]
• Republican Congressman Paul Ryan admitted that the GOP's alternative budget tax cut plan would increase the deficit. At the sight of a Republican admitting that tax cuts would increase the deficit, the minions of hell started a snowball fight, lions lay down with lambs and monkeys flew out of my butt. [ThinkProgress]
• My butt monkeys set off for Utah, where on July 1st you'll be able to drink alcohol without a cover charge and a legal form. My butt monkeys like drinking, too, what can I say? [BBC]
• The minions of hell then proceeded to New York to help their boss's friend, Rush Limbaugh, pack up his apartment which he is totally, totally leaving because of the tax increases. [Huffington Post]
• After that, they're going to have to return to their jobs in college admissions offices, since their temps just openly admitted that even "need blind" colleges are only letting in rich kids because of the recession. Sorry suckers, hope you like public school since the only kids going Ivy this year are the ones whose parents can cough up tuition. [NY Times]
• Jim Webb is going to reform our entire criminal justice system single-handedly. There's no word if carrying your boss's gun to work will stay illegal. [Huffington Post]
• The Supreme Court decided that spam emails are Constitutional, proving that none of them had email accounts in the late nineties. [ZDNet]
• Obama's Navy Secretary nominee, Ray Mabus, will likely be confirmed despite his ugly divorce in which he taped a counseling session with his wife in which she threw her affair in his face and threatened to make their kids hate him. She now calls them "his children" since, apparently, they don't hate him. [Washington Post, NY Times]

Kristof continues:

In Darfur and eastern Chad, you can randomly approach any group of people and find heartbreaking stories. Mr. Clooney was clowning around with a group of boys bathing in the river - taking their photo and showing it to them digitally - and that's when we met the 13-year-old boy with the bullet in his knee.

[NY Times]

Bristol Palin and Sarah Palin gave interviews to Fox's Greta Von Susteren in which Bristol not only said abstinence is good but unrealistic and that women should wait until their late twenties to give birth but Sarah said something that I actually agreed with:

"Get beyond the ideal of abstinence," the 44 year old, new grandmother said. "Hey, life happens."

And I don't even think she meant it like "conceiving a baby" but as in "people are still having sex."

Hey, it's a start!

Anyway, Sarah is having budget problems in Alaska because of falling oil prices, so she's facing an unhappy economic downturn just like Japan, but at least she isn't giving drunken press conferences about it, like Japan's now-former Finance Minister did. Hillary Clinton is still putting Ms. Palin to shame though, meeting with Japanese families whose loved ones were abducted by North Korea and warning the countryabout launching yet another missile because, apparently, the North Koreans saw Team America: World Police and thought it a good model of behavior.

In other news, Hillary's Senatorial replacement, Kirsten Gillibrand, was keeping rifles under her bed for "protection" in upstate New York, but she's moved them following an uproar. (She's got young kids.) The guy who appointed her, Governor David Paterson, is now polling in the gutter, trailing New York Attorney General Andrew "Shucking And Jiving Is Not A Racist Term" Cuomo in a potential 2010 primary match up by 50 percent. Great.

In international news, Barack Obama isn't set to make any decisions about sending more troops to Afghanistan right away but, before he does, he may let cameras back into Dover Air Force Base to capture the coffin ceremonies that the first and then second President Bush banned so as not to have another Vietnam. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is totally about to be indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes which is opposed by everyone in the world including most Arab countries, Islamic countries, African countries, developing countries and China. Hey, did you know they have oil there?

David Scheffer, who served under Clinton as the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues, writes in the LA Times that, in this case, there is more than enough evidence to show that Bashir is using rape to not just oppress the women in Darfur but to exterminate their ethic groups.

Moreno-Ocampo bases his charge that Bashir is committing genocide through the orchestrated and targeted use of rape as a weapon of war based on two rarely-used ways of eliminating an ethnic group or people:

"causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group" or "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

Although the mass-rapes in Darfur are not as fast-acting a method of genocide as killing everyone in the area, they do accomplish several things that might legitimately end the existence of the Fur, Massalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups. For one, the brutality of the assaults leaves many women infertile, which means that less children can be born. Furthermore, the women contend that they are raped in order to impregnate them with babies of mixed ethnicity who are not accepted as members of their ethnic group, which means that many of the children aren't considered part of the groups that Bashir is trying to destroy. Furthermore, because of the stigma of rape and having a baby fathered by a Janjaweed rapist, Moreno-Ocampo contends that "infanticide and abandonment are common" in Darfur among rape victims, reducing the children born to the ethnic groups targeted for destruction even more.

Scheffer writes of his experience:

In the 1990s, when I was the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues, I met scores of women who had been raped during the atrocities in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Uganda and the eastern Congo. In most cases, the experience was devastating to their character, their ethnic bonds and often to their physical health. Even if they were still physically able to bear children, these women typically were ostracized from their communities and could not marry their ethnic men. Confronted with these stories, I recognized that mass rape can destroy a substantial part of a group and thus constitute genocide.

He also urges the U.S. to continue blocking efforts by China, Russia and the African Union to block the ICC from issuing an arrest warrant for Bashir, which they claim is for the sake of UN peace keepers in the region. Protecting the peace keepers worked really well in Rwanda, right guys?

Rape As Genocide In Darfur [LA Times]

• A park ranger in Kenya has "adopted" a 2-year-old rhino named Max whom he protects from poachers in the park and horny older female rhinos looking for a mate. • Many Iraqi women fear openly running as a candidate for elections in Iraq (where there is a 25% quota for women in office) due to violence from the fundamentalist insurgency. • What ever happened to Ilan Mitchell-Smith from Weird Science? He became an English professor at Angelo State University in Texas, where he focuses on medieval literature and gender studies. • New research shows that children who are aggressive at a young age and/or exposed to a harsh parenting style are more likely to become victims of continual abuse from their peers in childhood. • The California Department of Public Health announced that on November 17th it will be restoring an option of designating a marrying couple as "bride" or "groom," which had been previously removed from official forms when gay marriage was legalized. • Last Tuesday, Canadian authorities seized a 22-hour-old baby from her mentally disabled mother, who was painted by the media as being "too stupid to parent." • Meanwhile, in Canada, a man from Tyndall is suing a woman because he alleges that she raped him while he was asleep and became pregnant, causing him "anxiety" about possibly paying child support. • Bud Light reveals a sexist new ad that promotes its "easy-drinking" swill with things that are "easy" and "drinking" (wink, wink). • On Sunday, 35 young women were arrested in southern Sudan for "disturbing the peace" by wearing tight trousers. The women were later released without charge. • Gmail has introduced Goggles, a free software for its users that makes them solve simple math problems to verify their state of mind before sending late-night, drunken emails. •

[Image via Carrie Vs. D.C.]

According to the BBC, 10 UN "peacekeepers" gang-raped Elizabeth in a field. "They grabbed me and threw me to the ground and they forced themselves on me... I tried to escape but there were 10 of them and I could do nothing…I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding." When village elders tried to report the abuse, they were ignored.

Save the Children suggests that a global watchdog organization be formed to monitor these kinds of abuses, supplemented by local complaints mechanisms and public awareness campaigns. In the meantime, the UN says it has a zero tolerance policy when allegations of sexual abuse are at hand, and last year 100 Sri Lankan soldiers stationed in Haiti were sent home when it became evident that they were paying for sex.

Charity: Aid Workers Raping, Abusing Children [CNN]
Sexual Abuse Of Children By Aid Workers Too Often Unreported [Save the Children]
Peacekeepers 'Abusing Children' [BBC]

Earlier: If You Can't Afford Rice In Haiti, You Eat Dirt

A product known as LifeWrap can stabilize a woman who is hemorrhaging. It's like a partial wet suit, made of neoprene and Velcro, costs $160 and can be used 50 times. (The company gladly accepts donations.) A study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health also found a relatively inexpensive way to treat mothers and reduce blood loss. Researchers reduced the number and severity of episiotomies at public hospitals in Latin America and increased the use of the hormone oxytocin - which is given to mothers to make their uterus shrink and bleed less during the third stage of labor. Paul Farmer and Ophelia Dahl of Partners in Health, have been working in Haiti and Rwanda, where health care for women (and especially girls) is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty. Writes Dr. Famer: "Obscene though it is, death during childbirth isn't the end of the story. In the world's poorest areas, many orphaned children wind up destitute and on the streets within a few years of their mothers' deaths, sometimes resorting to desperate or criminal measures for food, shelter, clothes or school fees."

Brigid McConville is the director of White Ribbon Alliance in London, an international organization to promote safe motherhood. She notes that African women have a 1 in 16 chance of dying from a pregnancy, compared with 1 in 1,400 in Europe. ""These are needless and preventable deaths. This is not a strange illness that requires science to find a cure," McConville says. "If you get it right for mothers, you've got the health staff in place in the community, you've got the referral system to the next level, you've got the operating theater, the anesthetist, the electricity and communications. All of this will benefit a man with a broken leg or a child with a respiratory illness."

The only question here is this: If saving the lives of pregnant women increases the heath of humans on a global level, why doesn't the cause get more attention? And why can't we meet the goal the UN has set?

Battling To Take Death Out Of Birth In Africa [Reuters]
Simple Innovation Saves Women's Lives [Our Bodies Our Blog]
Keeping New Mothers Alive [Washington Post]
Related: LifeWraps [University Of California San Francisco]
Partners In Health
White Ribbon Alliance

China will certainly appear, to the millions who attend its utterly whitewashed, coalfire/street people/industrial belch-free/parallel universe-inhabiting Olympic Games, to be not so bad. And shit, on a historical scale or compared alongside conditions in much of the Third World, that's true. But for the same 1.5 billion reasons guys like Spielberg are so transfixed by the place, women like Mia Farrow — and Angelina Jolie and George Clooney, who is not a woman but maybe we could make him an honorary one for this purpose — are doing their public duty as famous people who know lots of other famous people, to look out for less famous ones. I love you, Mia Farrow, and I'm glad you didn't need to have anyone's legs broken over this; the power of your message seemed to be enough.

Spielberg Quits [Washington Post]
MiaFarrow.org
Script Issues Block Cusack Film From Shooting In China [USA Today]