Tag Archives: top stories

You Don’t Have To Be a Foul-Mouthed White Guy To Be a World-Class Chef

by NanceeDundalli Posted on March 11, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

What does it take to break the mold in a prestigious, white-male-dominated industry? I took that question on in a recent piece on how women chefs, who, despite impressive advances in recent years, get short shrift when it comes to big-name awards and invitations to high-minded culinary confabs. But restaurants’ diversity problem is bigger than just a gender imbalance. More then two centuries after the invention of the fine-dining restaurant in the wake of the French Revolution, chefly prestige remains largely—but not completely—the domain of not just males, but white males. What gives?

On a frigid evening in Harlem last week, I got the opportunity to put the question directly to four mold-breakers in a public conversation at Ginny’s Supper Club, the cozy, red-tinted, speakeasy-like saloon in the cellar of Red Rooster, Chef Marcus Samuelsson’s neo-soul-food establishment on Lennox just north of 125th Street. The evening started with wine and snacks, which included house-made charcuterie, cheese, and cornbread madeleines—the latter, I thought, a clever mashup of French and US traditions, a Proustian nod to our most memory-drenched and historically fraught region, the South. My own melancholic musings aside, the room buzzed and glowed in the hour or so leading up to the panel—a diverse crowd of 150 or so chatted and circulated, young, old, and in between, culinary students, chefs, writers, and food lovers of all stripes, from the neighborhood and other parts of Manhattan, from Brooklyn, and even, I hear, from Chicago.

Eventually, we took to the stage: to my right Marcus himself; then Gabrielle Hamilton, chef/proprietor of the highly influential East Village spot Prune; then Charlene Johnson-Hadley, a daughter of Brooklyn’s West Indian diaspora who worked her way up through Samuelsson’s Red Rooster kitchen and is now executive chef at his Lincoln Center outpost American Table Bar and Cafe; and finally Floyd Cardoz, chef at North End Grill in Battery Park City, who brought the cooking of his native India into the glamor of a buzzy Manhattan restaurant with the late and much-lamented Tabla.

Unfortunately, our conversation wasn’t recorded; but Eater delivered a “10 Best Quotes” piece; Serious Eats’ Jacqueline Raposo has a very thoughtful post on the event, also with several quotes; and the blogger Ronda Lee offered worthy commentary on the event.

My favorite parts of the discussion were:

Two New York icons: Samuelsson and Hamiton.

1) Marcus—wgo was born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden—talking about coming up as an ambitious young cook in France, where the message he got was “ce n’est pas possible,” i.e., it’s not possible for a black man to command his own kitchen. His outsider status served as a spur, he said: with the conventional path to chefdom blocked to him, he had to forge his own, which included moving to the melting pot of New York and grabbing the reins of the Swedish restaurant Aquavit.

2) Gabrielle talking about how she found herself in the restaurant world not out of a passion for cooking but rather out of the need to support herself at a very young age—and about how being a woman in kitchens when she came up in the 1980s meant having to forge an identity, a way to fit in, since there was no pre-existing identity to fall into. Here’s her money quote, which I’m cribbing from Eater because I didn’t take notes:

Yes, there were horrible white men in the kitchens and the hardest part of that is the contortions you’d put yourself through to figure out your place in that kitchen. Should I be a chain-smoking dirt-talking motherfucker who can crank it f*cking out? Or should I be kind of a dainty female with lipstick and be like ‘Can you help me with this stock pot because I just can’t?’ Frankly it’s a freaking second job on top of what you’re already doing. One of the hardest parts is trying to a viable self that you can live with and and go home and respect at the end of the day.

3) Charlene talking about how she was drawn to cooking as a child through her grandmother’s Jamaican-inflected kitchen, and how, while in college in the 1990s, she realized she wanted to make a career of cooking, which sent her to culinary school and her current path. It struck me that unlike Marcus and Gabrielle, who came up by in the 1980s, Charlene could envision for herself a conventional path to success: go to chef’s school, get a job. Here’s Charlene’s take on being a woman of color in the professional kitchen (quote from Raposo’s piece): “I just think you need to get past yourself and not think of yourself as ‘the different one.’ That shouldn’t be your focus. Your focus should be following your ambition, making sure you are doing what it is you want to do, and making yourself an asset to wherever you are.”

4) Floyd on aspiring to cook professionally while growing up middle class in India—and the culture shock it gave his parents, who hoped he would be a doctor. Until pretty recently, the professional kitchen was a place middle class people aspired to flee. Now, with the rise of the celebrity chef, it has emerged as a site of aspiration. Hamilton touched on that topic, too, when she mentioned that suddenly, “40-year-old white males” are applying to work in her kitchen. She went on (quote from Raposo):

Now we have the whole new problem of, “I used to be an architect” and “I have a trust fund” and “I have so much more money and power than you’re ever going to have in this world.” And you have to go up to that guy and say, “You know, your sauce is a little salty.”

As Ronda Lee put it in her blog post, “gender and race in the professional kitchen is a lot to cover in a two-hour discussion.” And our panel in Harlem last week barely scratched the surface. I learned again what I learned when writing my piece on gender: This is a fascinating and complex conversation, one that people working to make the restaurant world more inclusive are eager to have. There’s so much we didn’t get to—for example, what about the role of Mexican immigrants, who are the lifeblood of kitchen lines from Los Angeles to New York? We at Mother Jones plan to continue exploring it. Stay tuned.

Taken from: 

You Don’t Have To Be a Foul-Mouthed White Guy To Be a World-Class Chef

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, Keurig, LG, ONA, Oster, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on You Don’t Have To Be a Foul-Mouthed White Guy To Be a World-Class Chef

What the Ukraine Crisis Means for the Energy Industry

by Antwan63Otcsprd Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here’s how it’s been in Ukraine: Cheap natural gas and massive loans from Russia; crooks and oligarchs in both Ukraine and Russia skimming money from the energy sector; and understandably squeamish foreign investors balking at having skin in the game.

On top of all that, there’s the ever-present risk for Western Europe of Russia turning off the gas tap. Most of Russia’s gas exports to Europe go through Ukraine’s pipeline system; Russian exports account for 60 percent of Ukraine’s gas consumption and around a third of Europe’s as a whole. Russia has long been able to use Ukraine as an energy choke point.

It all came to head in recent days, as then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was forced from power and Russian-backed troops seized control of government buildings on Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. On Tuesday, Russia decided to cancel the economic lifeline it extended last year to Yanukovych, a deal that had included a hefty 30 percent discount on natural gas and the purchase of Ukraine’s debt. “That is not linked to politics or anything,” Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted. “We had a deal: We give you money and lower gas price, you pay us regularly. We gave money and lowered the gas price but there are no payments. So Gazprom Russia’s state-run gas company naturally says this is a no go.”

Now, American and European leaders are confronting the question of how to deal with Russia’s significant influence over the world’s hydrocarbon economy while also helping Ukraine’s fledgling government stand on its own two feet and clean up its energy act.

Here are four things you need to know about the role of energy in the current crisis:

1. The United States is rushing to push more gas onto the market to undercut Putin’s power. Russia’s presence in Ukraine is prompting calls, especially among congressional Republicans, to loosen export restrictions on US natural gas in the hopes of diminishing Russia’s ability to use gas as a diplomatic weapon, like it did in 2006 and 2009. With America’s newfound dominance in gas production (in 2013, the United States surpassed Russia to become the biggest producer of oil and gas, thanks in part to fracking) comes greater power in energy diplomacy.

“One immediate step the president can and should take is to dramatically expedite the approval of US exports of natural gas,” House Speaker John Boehner said on Tuesday. Adding new supplies to the global market—the United States is already in the process of approving a range of proposals to export gas—”sends a clear signal that the global gas market is changing, that there is the prospect of much greater supply coming from other parts of the world,” Carlos Pascual from the State Department told the New York Times.

But Tim Boersma, a fellow in the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution, warns that there are going to be no easy and fast solutions to the energy dominance Russia has established in Ukraine. “At the end of the day, what will not really change—whether we like it or not—is that Ukraine is an important transit country for natural gas,” he says. “The notion that some people have put out there that Ukraine could become independent of Russian gas in not realistic at all.”

2. Russia isn’t as powerful as you might think. But for all the Russian posturing, and the canceled energy deal, Ukraine—and Europe more broadly—does have some leverage over Russia to prevent the situation from deteriorating further, says Edward Chow, an energy and security analyst at Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “Interestingly, the gas pipelines, as well as critically important gas storage facilities, all go through Western Ukraine,” he says. “Until Russians build additional bypass pipelines…they are still highly dependent on Ukraine to transit gas exports to Europe.” And Ukraine’s supplies, mostly in the pro-reform western part of the country, could withstand a four-month Russian blockade, according to Reuters.

Tim Boersma from Brookings says Europe is in a good place right now to apply pressure: “Both parties have a lot to lose here,” he says. “But I would argue that Russia has more to lose than Europe at the moment. Russia needs European markets. Russia needs European demands. It is making roughly $100 million dollars a day from hydrocarbons.”

“Making matters worse would not really be good for Russia,” Boersma says. “As a hydrocarbon state, it essentially needs these revenues.”

Ukraine is already flexing its muscle as a consumer, and other countries are willing to help. The government’s energy minister announced yesterday that Ukraine is planning to reduce its reliance on Russian imports, filling the gap with Slovakian and German gas.

Meanwhile, because of an unusually mild winter that has resulted in lower heating demand throughout Europe, gas storage across the continent are up 13 percentage points from the same time last year, the highest since 2008, according to reporting by Bloomberg Businessweek. More gas in the tanks could mean Europe is more willing and able to hold its ground with Russia.

Reuters is also reporting that the European Union is trying to loosen the grip Russia has over Ukraine by offering energy to Ukraine through “reverse flows” of gas, sending back gas back east so Ukraine doesn’t have to rely on imports from Russia. And there’s also plenty of talk about Ukraine exploiting its own shale gas reserves via fracking, which some argue would help cure its addiction to Russian gas. In 2013, Chevron and Shell signed separate deals to explore extracting shale gas in Ukraine.

3. Now is the time to clean up Ukraine’s corruption. Ukraine has been hooked on cheap Russian gas for too long, says CSIS’s Chow. That has stifled incentives to modernize the economy and look for energy alternatives, all the while lining the pockets of the rich and powerful to the tune of billions of dollars every year. Chow says graft is endemic in Ukraine’s oil and gas industry. (Transparency International ranks Ukraine 144 out of 177 countries for perceptions of corruption).

“There was a so-called gas mafia that was around Yanukovych, but he wasn’t alone,” says Chow. “So this goes way back in time: Basically, the gas lobby siphoned off money through the flow of Russian gas through Ukraine to Europe. It’s a corrupt scheme.”

Chow hopes that the country’s fresh batch of leaders—with the mandate of a street revolution behind them and motivated by Putin’s “historic overreach”—will tackle the corruption that has infected politics and business since the country’s independence. “This is a once-in-a-long-while opportunity to finally fix the Ukrainian energy sector” by attracting foreign investment and making the gas deals transparent to the outside world says Chow.

4. The United States and European Union are making energy reform central to their aid packages. Bill Gibbons, a spokesman for the US Energy Department, said on Tuesday that the Obama administration is directing part of the $1 billion loan guarantee that John Kerry delivered to Kiev this week to “energy security, energy efficiency and energy sector reform.” The European Union’s $15 billion package is also aimed, in part, at modernizing Ukraine’s gas transit system.

With patrons of this much-needed aid linking their help to energy reform, there might well be a bigger chance of success, says Chow. “If you don’t do it now, when are you going to do it?” he asks. “Because Russia is not going to be interested in helping individuals from the new Ukrainian government extract rent like the previous government unless they can cooperate on other fronts. So this is quite a good opportunity to clean things up.”

Original article:  

What the Ukraine Crisis Means for the Energy Industry

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, Keurig, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What the Ukraine Crisis Means for the Energy Industry

Facebook Cracks Down on Illegal Gun Sales

by NestorHPOM Posted on March 5, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Facebook has officially decided that it doesn’t like shady gun deals. On Wednesday, the social-sharing behemoth announced significant policy changes aimed at policing gun trafficking on its platform: The company will delete posts that offer to buy or sell guns without background checks, block users under the age of 18 from viewing gun listings, and require all gun pages and groups to prominently refer to laws governing gun sales. Facebook will also apply controls to its photo-sharing subsidiary Instagram, which has also grown as an outlet for gun trafficking.

The move comes after weeks of pressure spearheaded by Moms Demand Action, the grassroots advocacy group formed after the Sandy Hook massacre that recently merged with Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Moms Demand Action says it drew more than 230,000 supporters for a petition urging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom to deal with the issue. “Our campaign showed how easy it is for minors, felons and other dangerous people to get guns online,” founder Shannon Watts said in a statement. “We are happy that these companies listened to American mothers and we believe these changes are a major step toward making sure people who buy or sell guns on their platforms know the law, and follow it.”

GunSellerz/Facebook

Exactly how Facebook will go about enforcing the new policies is unclear, and it remains to be seen how effectively the company will be able to control such activity on its pages. But at a minimum these changes—which also allow Facebook users to flag suspicious posts—should help diminish the opportunity for kids and felons to acquire firearms.

Yet, would-be criminals may simply flock elsewhere, as there remains at least one major social-sharing site where such deals can easily go down: Reddit. As we were the first to report back in January, Reddit hosts thousands of for-sale listings for military-style assault rifles, semi-automatic handguns, high-capacity magazines, and other weaponry. The site appears to be particularly ripe for dubious gun deals, because most of its users operate anonymously—and because, as a company official confirmed to us, Reddit does not track the gun transactions on its site and has no idea whether they are conducted legally. That didn’t stop the company from granting its users permission to engrave Reddit’s official logo on assault rifles.

Moms Demand Action says that it plans to keep pressuring companies to act in the interest of gun safety, though according to a spokesperson the group has had no conversations with Reddit yet.

via Reddit

Visit source: 

Facebook Cracks Down on Illegal Gun Sales

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Facebook Cracks Down on Illegal Gun Sales

Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind

by HelaineM45 Posted on March 3, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Vaccine denial is dangerous. We know this for many reasons, but just consider one of them: In California in 2010, 10 children died in a whooping cough outbreak that was later linked, in part, to the presence of 39 separate clusters of unvaccinated children in the state. It’s that simple: When too many children go unvaccinated, vaccine-preventable diseases spread more easily, and sometimes children die. Nonetheless, as scientifically unfounded fears about childhood vaccines causing autism have proliferated over the past decade or more, a minority of parents are turning to “personal belief exemptions,” so-called “alternative vaccine schedules,” and other ways to dodge or delay vaccinating their kids.

So as a rational person, you might think it would be of the utmost importance to try to talk some sense into these people. But there’s a problem: According to a major new study in the journal Pediatrics, trying to do so may actually make the problem worse. The paper tested the effectiveness of four separate pro-vaccine messages, three of which were based very closely on how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) itself talks about vaccines. The results can only be called grim: Not a single one of the messages was successful when it came to increasing parents’ professed intent to vaccinate their children. And in several cases the messages actually backfired, either increasing the ill-founded belief that vaccines cause autism or even, in one case, apparently reducing parents’ intent to vaccinate.

Click here for more on vaccine-dodging parents.

The study, by political scientist Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College* and three colleagues, adds to a large body of frustrating research on how hard it is to correct false information and get people to accept indisputable facts. Nyhan and one of his coauthors, Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, are actually the coauthors of a much discussed previous study showing that when politically conservative test subjects read a fake newspaper article containing a quotation of George W. Bush asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, followed by a factual correction stating that this was not actually true, they believed Bush’s falsehood more strongly afterwards—an outcome that Nyhan and Reifler dubbed a “backfire effect.”

Unfortunately, the vaccine issue is prime terrain for such biased and motivated reasoning; recent research even suggests that a conspiratorial, paranoid mindset prevails among some vaccine rejectionists. To try to figure out how to persuade them, in the new study researchers surveyed a representative sample of 1,759 Americans with at least one child living in their home. A first phase of the study determined their beliefs about vaccines; then, in a follow-up, respondents were asked to consider one of four messages (or a control message) about vaccine effectiveness and the importance of kids getting the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine.

The first message, dubbed “Autism correction,” was a factual, science-heavy correction of false claims that the MMR vaccine causes autism, assuring parents that the vaccine is “safe and effective” and citing multiple studies that disprove claims of an autism link. The second message, dubbed “Disease risks,” simply listed the many risks of contracting the measles, the mumps, or rubella, describing the nasty complications that can come with these diseases. The third message, dubbed “Disease narrative,” told a “true story” about a 10-month-old whose temperature shot up to a terrifying 106 degrees after he contracted measles from another child in a pediatrician’s waiting room.

Child with measles CDC/llinois Department of Public Health

All three of these messages are closely based on messages (here, here, and here) that appear on the CDC website. And then there was a final message that was not directly based on CDC communications, dubbed “Disease images.” In this case, as a way of emphasizing the importance of vaccines, test subjects were asked to examine three fairly disturbing images of children afflicted with measles, mumps, and rubella. One of those images used is at right.

The results showed that by far, the least successful messages were “Disease narrative” and “Disease images.” Hearing the frightening narrative actually increased respondents’ likelihood of thinking that getting the MMR vaccine will cause serious side effects, from 7.7 percent to 13.8 percent. Similarly, looking at the disturbing images increased test subjects’ belief that vaccines cause autism. In other words, both of these messages backfired.

Why did that happen? Dartmouth’s Nyhan isn’t sure, but he comments that “if people read about or see sick children, it may be easier to imagine other kinds of health risks to children, including possibly side effects of vaccines that are actually quite rare.” (When it comes to side effects, Nyhan is referring not to autism but to the small minority of cases in which vaccines cause adverse reactions.)

The two more straightforward text-only messages, “Austism correction” and “Disease risks,” had more mixed effects. “Disease risks” didn’t cause any harm, but it didn’t really produce any benefits either.

As for “Autism correction,” it actually worked, among survey respondents as a whole, to somewhat reduce belief in the falsehood that vaccines cause autism. But at the same time, the message had an unexpected negative effect, decreasing the percentage of parents saying that they would be likely to vaccinate their children.

Looking more closely, the researchers found that this occurred because of a strong backfire effect among the minority of test subjects who were the most distrustful of vaccines. In this group, the likelihood of saying they would give their kids the MMR vaccine decreased to 45 percent (versus 70 percent in the control group) after they received factual, scientific information debunking the vaccines-autism link. Indeed, the study therefore concluded that “no intervention increased intent to vaccinate among parents who are the least favorable toward vaccines.”

Nyhan carefully emphasizes that the study cannot say anything about the effectiveness of other possible messages beyond the ones that were tested. So there may be winners out there that simply weren’t in the experiment—although as Nyhan added, “I don’t have a good candidate.” In any event, given results like these, any new messages ought to be tested as well.

“I don’t think our results imply that they shouldn’t communicate why vaccines are a good idea,” adds Nyhan. “But they do suggest that we should be more careful to test the messages that we use, and to question the intuition that countering misinformation is likely to be the most effective strategy.”

Finally, Nyhan adds that in order to protect public health by encouraging widespread vaccinations, public communication efforts aren’t the only tools at our disposal. “Other policy measures might be more effective,” he notes. For instance, recently we reported on how easy it is for parents to dodge getting their kids vaccinated in some states; in some cases, it requires little more than a onetime signature on a form. Tightening these policies might be considerably more helpful than trying to win hearts and minds. That wasn’t really working out anyway, and thanks to the new study, we now know that vaccine deniers’ imperviousness to facts may be a key part of the reason why.

* This article previously referred to Dartmouth College as Dartmouth University. We regret the error.

From – 

Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind

Did American Taxpayers Help Push Through Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law?

by LauraFore Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This week, when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni approved a harsh new bill making “aggravated homosexuality” a crime punishable by life in prison, he cited a recent report from the Ugandan Ministry of Health’s Committee on Homosexuality, which concluded that same-sex attraction is mostly a learned impulse. “Since nurture is the main cause of homosexuality, then society can do something about it to discourage the trends,” Museveni said. “That is why I have agreed to sign the bill.”

This pronouncement creates a quandary for the United States. American officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, have vehemently condemned Museveni’s decision. Yet millions of US taxpayer dollars are flowing to the agency that the Ugandan leader used to justify the legislation, according to records from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gay rights activist argue that the Committee on Homosexuality report was engineered to ensure the bill’s passage, and at least one committee member—a physician named Eugene Kinyanda—refused to sign his name to it because the process had “taken a very political” direction. “I will not be used to justify the passing of a bill which as a doctor I do not fully understand,” he wrote in an email to a fellow committee member, which was reprinted on the blog Patheos.

Continue Reading »

Jump to original:

Did American Taxpayers Help Push Through Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law?

Posted in Anchor, ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Did American Taxpayers Help Push Through Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law?

Georgia Wants to Allow Businesses to Kick Gay People Out of Diners

by LynneFitebilqd Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A bill moving swiftly through the Georgia House of Representatives would allow business owners who believe homosexuality is a sin to openly discriminate against gay Americans by denying them employment or banning them from restaurants and hotels.

The proposal, dubbed the Preservation of Religious Freedom Act, would allow any individual or for-profit company to ignore Georgia laws—including anti-discrimination and civil rights laws—that “indirectly constrain” exercise of religion. Atlanta, for example, prohibits discrimination against LGBT residents seeking housing, employment, and public accommodations. But the state bill could trump Atlanta’s protections.

The Georgia bill, which was introduced last week and was scheduled to be heard in subcommittee Monday afternoon, was sponsored by six state representatives (some of them Democrats). A similar bill has been introduced in the state Senate.

The Georgia House bill’s text is largely identical to controversial legislation that passed in Arizona last week. The Arizona measure—which is currently awaiting Republican Gov. Jan Brewer’s signature—has drawn widespread protests from LGBT groups and local businesses. One lawmaker who voted for the Arizona bill, Sen. Steve Pierce (R-Prescott), went so far as to publicly change his mind.

Georgia and Arizona are only the latest states to push religious freedom bills that could nullify discrimination laws. The new legislation is part of a wave of state laws drafted in response to a New Mexico lawsuit in which a photographer was sued for refusing to work for a same-sex couple.

Unlike similar bills introduced in Kansas, Tennessee, and South Dakota, the Georgia and Arizona bills do not explicitly target same-sex couples. But that difference could make the impact of the Georgia and Arizona bills even broader. Legal experts, including Eunice Rho, advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU, warn that Georgia and Arizona’s religious-freedom bills are so sweeping that they open the door for discrimination against not only gay people, but other groups as well. The New Republic noted that under the Arizona bill, “a restaurateur could deny service to an out-of-wedlock mother, a cop could refuse to intervene in a domestic dispute if his religion allows for husbands beating their wives, and a hotel chain could refuse to rent rooms to Jews, Hindus, or Muslims.”

“The government should not allow individuals or corporations to use religion as an excuse to discriminate or to deny other access to basic healthcare and safety precautions,” Maggie Garrett, legislative director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, wrote in a letter to a Georgia House Judiciary subcommittee on Sunday.

State representative Sam Teasley, the first sponsor listed on the bill, did not respond to request for comment Monday.

“The bill was filed and is being pushed solely because that’s what all the cool conservative kids are doing, and because it sends a message of defiance to those who believe that gay Americans ought to be treated the same as everybody else,” writes Jay Bookman, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Passing it would seriously stain the reputation of Georgia and the Georgia Legislature.”

Link: 

Georgia Wants to Allow Businesses to Kick Gay People Out of Diners

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Georgia Wants to Allow Businesses to Kick Gay People Out of Diners

Uganda’s President Signs Extreme Law That Has Led to Calls to Kill, Burn, and Beat Gays

by MaribelClifford Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Brushing aside protests from Western leaders and human rights organizations, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the country’s draconian anti-gay bill into law Monday. The measure increases the penalty for homosexuality, which was already illegal, to life in prison in some cases. It also includes a raft of other harsh provisions, as Human Rights Watch explains:

The “attempt to commit homosexuality” incurs a penalty of seven years as does “aiding and abetting” homosexuality. A person who “keeps a house, room, set of rooms, or place of any kind for purposes of homosexuality” also faces seven years’ imprisonment. Because the law also criminalizes the “promotion” of homosexuality, there are far-reaching implications beyond the increase in punishments for same-sex sexual conduct…Public health promotion and prevention efforts targeting “at risk” groups might have to be curtailed, and health educators and healthcare providers could also face criminal sanction under the same provision.

During the signing ceremony at his official residence outside the capital, Kampala, Museveni blamed the rise of gay culture in Uganda on “arrogant and careless Western groups that are fond of coming into our schools and recruiting young children into homosexuality and lesbianism” and claimed that some were doing so for “mercenary reasons—to get money—in effect homosexual prostitutes.”

Gay rights activists say the climate for gays in Uganda has already deteriorated drastically since the bill passed the Ugandan parliament in December. According to Frank Mugisha, the executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, the nation’s primary gay rights group, police are rounding up 30 to 40 suspected homosexuals each week. In some cases, simply being unmarried and spending time in the company of people of the same gender is enough to arouse police suspicion. Mugisha also says that the bill’s passage has also brought a surge in anti-gay vigilantism and that religious leaders in the suburbs surrounding Kampala have been calling for gays to be killed or burned over the public address systems. “The situation is extremely worrying,” Mugisha says. “We are living in fear.”

Maria Burnett, a senior Africa researcher for Human Rights Watch, believes Uganda may see more anti-gay violence now that the bill is officially law. “When political leaders stir up hate,” she says, “it can look like a tacit approval of this kind of mob violence.” Burnett also stressed that the measure’s passage was part of a “broader pattern of clawing back basic human rights, such as freedom of association and freedom of expression, in Uganda.”

The White House sounded a similar note in a statement late Monday morning: “As President Obama has said, this law is more than an affront and a danger to the gay community in Uganda, it reflects poorly on the country’s commitment to protecting the human rights of its people and will undermine public health, including efforts to fight HIV/AIDS. We will continue to urge the Ugandan government to repeal this abhorrent law and to advocate for the protection of the universal human rights of LGBT persons in Uganda and around the world.”

For more on the roots of Uganda’s anti-gay law, see Mac McClelland’s “The Love that Dares.”

Link to original:

Uganda’s President Signs Extreme Law That Has Led to Calls to Kill, Burn, and Beat Gays

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Uganda’s President Signs Extreme Law That Has Led to Calls to Kill, Burn, and Beat Gays

Jury Finds Tea Party Senate Candidate Who Rand Paul Endorsed Misled Investors to the Tune of $250,000

by 4q4cv8v Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On the stump, Greg Brannon, the tea party candidate in North Carolina’s competitive Senate race, preaches personal responsibility and rails against out-of-control government spending.

So a recent jury verdict that held Brannon responsible for misleading two investors who gave him a quarter million dollars is quite a blow to the image Brannon has tried to craft of a crusader for better financial decisions in government.

Brannon, a full-time OB-GYN, is best distinguished from the rest of the GOP primary candidates vying to replace Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan by his extreme beliefs: He has said public education “does nothing…other than dehumanize” students and that food stamps are “slavery.” Recent GOP primary polls have Brannon trailing the front-runner, North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis, by single digits. Endorsements from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and conservative leaders such as RedState editor Erick Erickson have given Brannon a significant fundraising boost.

His legal troubles are linked to Neogence Enterprises, a defunct technology company Brannon cofounded several years ago. The company tried to develop a smartphone application which Brannon pitched as a “social augmented reality network connecting people, places and things” and a once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity. Last week, a civil jury concluded that Brannon had led two investors to believe that Verizon was considering preinstalling the application on certain smartphones. (The Raleigh News & Observer first reported the verdict.) Although Neogence pitched Verizon, the cellphone carrier never, in fact, made that offer.

The jury cleared Robert Rice, Neogence’s former CEO, of similar wrongdoing. Brannon’s case defense probably foundered due to emails he sent bragging of Neogence’s potential partnership with Verizon. “I know all of you are BUSY!!!” Brannon wrote in one email. “I need you to give a few minutes to look at this potential. THANK YOU for your TRUST!! Greg.”

The two investors who brought the suit are a former classmate of Brannon’s from medical school, Larry Piazza, and the husband of one of Brannon’s patients, Sam Lampuri. In court, Lampuri, a Raleigh plumber who gave Brannon $100,000, testified that Brannon “pretty much spoke about Neogence every time my wife was in stirrups.” Brannon must now repay Piazza and Lampuri a total of $250,000 plus interest.

Brannon has boasted about his personal connection with his patients before. In a fall 2013 fundraiser for Hand of Hope, his nonprofit crisis pregnancy center, Brannon said, “When I see little girls that come here, boyfriends that do show up are my favorites. Then I can whoop on them with love. How many people have we got married over the last 20 years just by riding that boy’s rear end?”

Brannon’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment last week. In the run-up to the trial, Brannon told the News & Observer, “I can’t wait for my day in court.” After the verdict, he said, “I cannot wait to go to the appeal process.”

Visit site: 

Jury Finds Tea Party Senate Candidate Who Rand Paul Endorsed Misled Investors to the Tune of $250,000

Posted in Anchor, Bragg, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jury Finds Tea Party Senate Candidate Who Rand Paul Endorsed Misled Investors to the Tune of $250,000

Openly Gay NBA Player Jason Collins Signed by Brooklyn Nets

by BenitoStingley Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The NBA will have its first openly gay active player. Jason Collins, who came out in Sports Illustrated last April, signed a 10-day contract Sunday with the Brooklyn Nets. When Collins steps on to the court, it will be the first time an athlete who is widely known to be gay will have played in an NBA, NFL, NHL, or MLB game.

Collins announced he was gay when, after a slew of injuries, he wasn’t on any team’s roster and he remained unsigned until the Nets recently reached out to him. Collins will likely make his first appearance in the Nets’ Sunday night game against the Los Angeles Lakers.

Collins’ NBA return comes as former University of Missouri football player Michael Sam is working out at the NFL Combine and preparing for the league’s May draft. Sam, who came out in February, is looking to be the first openly gay player in the NFL. John Amaechi became the first former NBA player to come out in 2007, though he did so after his five-season career was over. Glenn Burke, who played baseball for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Oakland Athletics from 1976 to 1979, may have been the first openly gay player in any major American professional sport—though reporters at the time kept Burke’s sexuality under wraps and the Dodgers even tried paying him to take part in a sham marriage. (Burke refused.)

Collins received the public backing of many NBA stars when he came out last year. That support continued during the signing process, with new teammate Kevin Garnett telling reporters, “I think it’s important that anybody who has the capabilities and skill level gets a chance to do something he’s great at. I think it would be bias, and in a sense, racist, if you were to keep that opportunity from a person.” Collins will wear jersey number 98 with the Nets in honor of Matthew Shepard, the University of Wyoming student whose brutal 1998 beating and death made him a gay rights martyr.

Continued: 

Openly Gay NBA Player Jason Collins Signed by Brooklyn Nets

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Openly Gay NBA Player Jason Collins Signed by Brooklyn Nets

Has Venezuela Turned Into a War Zone?

by merinenty Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Student protesters have filled the streets of many Venezuelan cities for the last two weeks to express their dissatisfaction with the socialist government, the deteriorating economy, and the violence that plagues the country. In the past few days the situation has worsened, as crackdowns from the National Guard and attacks from paramilitary groups have left at least six people dead so far.

Who are the protesters? Venezuela’s opposition party is unified by the desire to end the reign of “chavismo,” the socialist system devised by Hugo Chávez, and continued, albeit less handily, by his successor, Nicolás Maduro. The emergent leader of the protests is Leopoldo López, a Harvard-educated descendent of Simón Bolívar, and the former mayor of a Caracas municipality. He turned himself over to government forces after Maduro publicly demanded his arrest; López has called for more protests from prison. Also prominent in the opposition is María Corina Machado, a congresswoman in the National Assembly.

The protests started in the western border city of San Cristóbal, where students took to the streets on February 2 to express discontent with rampant crime. The forceful reaction of the authorities prompted other students in other cities to protest in solidarity. The protesters are largely from the middle class.

Maduro’s leadership has proved ineffective, and the economic policies he inherited from Chávez, including the nationalization of many industries, have wreaked havoc on the Venezuelan economy; these days, people are struggling to find the bare necessities. The scarcity index has reached an astonishing 28 percent, meaning that toilet paper, flour, and other basics simply might not be in stock. Maduro has threatened to raise gas prices, which were kept artificially low for 15 years because increasing them is politically disastrous. Inflation has more than doubled in the past year. Finally, the insanely high homicide rate, 39 deaths per 100,000 people in 2013, has many Venezuelans fed up with the status quo.

How is the government responding? Maduro, who narrowly beat opposition candidate Henrique Capriles in the election after Chávez’s March 2013 death, has swiftly cracked down on broadcast media coverage of the protests. The Colombian channel NTN24, which was covering the violence in the streets, has been taken off the air. Maduro expelled the CNN team today by revoking their press credentials.

Reports of paramilitary groups (known as colectivos), riding around on motorcycles and terrorizing protesters and civilians “tend to be exaggerated,” said David Smilde, a University of Georgia sociologist and senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America who returned from Venezuela yesterday. Though it is surely happening (with low quality video evidence to back it up), “that phenomenon appeals to the middle class’s worst nightmare of having these armed poor people on motorcycles.”

“The bigger problem,” Smilde continued, “is actually the government troops. The National Guard is the one that is doing the most violence, shooting on protesters and buildings. They tend to be very unprofessional. They don’t think in terms of civilian policing, so they will often fire on people who are fleeing. These are people who are 20 to 22 years old and oftentimes they end up being violent. I don’t think it’s necessarily state policy to repress voters. But the state could definitely make it clearer that there should be no violence.”

In a dramatic video, armed men reportedly from SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence agency, stormed the opposition party HQ. Reports have also surfaced of detainees being beaten, and the Human Rights Watch has called for the international community to condemn the violence against protesters and journalists.

How serious is the crisis? While some residents of Venezuela’s biggest cities, like Caracas, San Cristóbal, Mérida, Valencia, and Maracaibo decry the “war zone” in the streets, for many in Venezuela, life continues as normal. “From the outside it always looks like the whole country’s in flames, but of course life goes on and most things are up and running,” Smilde said.

However, San Cristóbal appears to be headed toward more dramatic confrontation. The Andean college town of 650,000, situated near the border with Colombia, has been heavily barricaded by opposition protesters. The government has cut off internet service to the city. Government paratroopers are on the way. And the opposition isn’t backing down, said Juan Nagel, editor of the blog Caracas Chronicles.

What’s going to happen next? So far it seems like the protests have not achieved support from the poor, who long have identified as chavistas. As Capriles, still the opposition’s biggest name, told The Economist, “For the protests to be successful, they must include the poor.”

Capriles has urged protesters to gather tomorrow en masse, and march peacefully. From prison, López passed a note to his wife, calling for more protests, a message that rapidly spread through social networks. “Tomorrow will tell what the future’s going to be,” Smilde said. If the turnout is huge and violence breaks out, Venezuela may be headed for prolonged unrest. If not, he said, things may “fizzle out.”

Leopoldo López Miguel Gutierrez/EFE/ZUMA

Boris Vergara/Xinhua/ZUMA

Boris Vergara/Xinhua/ZUMA

Boris Vergara/Xinhua/ZUMA

Nicolás Maduro Venezuela’s Presidency/Xinhua/ZUMA

Source: 

Has Venezuela Turned Into a War Zone?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Has Venezuela Turned Into a War Zone?