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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

States with abortion bans risk paying an economic price

States with abortion bans risk paying an economic price

The New York Times reports: As a group of conservative states enacted severe abortion restrictions last year, Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois sent letters to a handful of corporate executives with close ties to Texas. Mr. Pritzker, a Democrat, urged executives to rethink basing their companies in “a state that strips its residents of their dignity.” Most workers, he wrote, did not want to live under a rigid abortion ban. There was no immediate response to his overture. Companies thriving…

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Biden defends planned visit to Saudi Arabia as U.S. judge asks whether crown prince should get immunity

Biden defends planned visit to Saudi Arabia as U.S. judge asks whether crown prince should get immunity

Reuters reports: President Joe Biden on Saturday defended his decision to travel to Saudi Arabia saying human rights would be on his agenda as he gave a preview of a trip on which he aims to reset ties with the crown prince, who he previously denounced as a pariah. Biden will hold bilateral talks with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz and his leadership team, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on his visit to the Middle East next week. The…

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Women’s rights have suffered a grim setback. But history is still on our side

Women’s rights have suffered a grim setback. But history is still on our side

Rebecca Solnit writes: As it happened, I was in Edinburgh the day Roe v Wade was overturned, and the next day I caught a train back to London and did what I usually do when I get anywhere near King’s Cross station. I took the short walk to the old St Pancras churchyard to visit the tombstone of the great feminist ancestor Mary Wollstonecraft, author of that first great feminist manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. To be…

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Pelosi receives communion in Vatican amid abortion debate

Pelosi receives communion in Vatican amid abortion debate

The Associated Press reports: U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Pope Francis on Wednesday and received Communion during a papal Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, witnesses said, despite her position in support of abortion rights. Pelosi attended the morning Mass marking the feasts of St. Peter and St. Paul, during which Francis bestowed the woolen pallium stole on newly consecrated archbishops. She was seated in a VIP diplomatic section of the basilica and received Communion along with the rest…

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Women who are denied abortions risk falling deeper into poverty. So do their kids

Women who are denied abortions risk falling deeper into poverty. So do their kids

NPR reports: Like most women seeking an abortion, Brittany Mostiller already had children when she unexpectedly got pregnant again. “I had two young daughters both under the age of 5, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with my sister,” she says. She’d also just been laid off from her overnight job as a greeter for Greyhound buses. Her unemployment benefits were less than her wages there, and nearly all of them went toward rent and utilities. “I’m not even sure I had…

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Who knew losing our rights would feel this bad?

Who knew losing our rights would feel this bad?

Molly Jong-Fast writes: They overturned Roe v. Wade on a sunny and hot Friday in June. I was taking my daughter for a haircut when the Supreme Court released its ruling declaring that our bodies were no longer ours. Roe had been the crowning achievement of my mother’s generation of activism, and it was gone—a right we’d had for 49 years erased in pages of text we saw a draft of last month. And maybe it fit that as I…

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We are entering an era not just of unsafe abortions but of the widespread criminalization of pregnancy

We are entering an era not just of unsafe abortions but of the widespread criminalization of pregnancy

Jia Tolentino writes: In the weeks since a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—a case about a Mississippi law that bans abortion after fifteen weeks, with some health-related exceptions but none for rape or incest—was leaked, a slogan has been revived: “We won’t go back.” It has been chanted at marches, defiantly but also somewhat awkwardly, given that this is plainly an era of repression and regression, in which abortion rights are not…

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I was forced to give birth to my rapist’s baby. The end of Roe means more will suffer my hell

I was forced to give birth to my rapist’s baby. The end of Roe means more will suffer my hell

Dina Zirlott writes: My story is one that some already know, but for the sake of those who might not, and in light of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, it is best summarized by these three sentences: I was raped when I was 17 years old. I was forced to give birth to a baby when I was 18 years old. My baby died when I was 19 years old. I wrote my first essay for HuffPost in…

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Starving civilians is an ancient military tactic, but today it’s a war crime in Ukraine, Yemen, Tigray and elsewhere

Starving civilians is an ancient military tactic, but today it’s a war crime in Ukraine, Yemen, Tigray and elsewhere

Grain warehouse destroyed by Russian attacks in Kopyliv, Kyiv province, Ukraine, May 28, 2022. Dogukan Keskinkilic/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images By Tom Dannenbaum, Tufts University; Alex De Waal, Tufts University, and Daniel Maxwell, Tufts University A hideous contradiction is playing out in war-torn Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainians are starving in cities besieged by Russian forces. Meanwhile, the country’s grain stores are bursting with food, and the government is begging for international assistance to export Ukrainian grain to world markets. Freeing…

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Poland shows the risks for women’s lives when abortion is banned

Poland shows the risks for women’s lives when abortion is banned

The New York Times reports: It was shortly before 11 p.m. when Izabela Sajbor realized the doctors were prepared to let her die. Her doctor had already told her that her fetus had severe abnormalities and would almost certainly die in the womb. If it made it to term, life expectancy was a year, at most. At 22 weeks pregnant, Ms. Sajbor had been admitted to a hospital after her water broke prematurely. She knew that there was a short…

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Russia has incited genocide in Ukraine, independent legal experts conclude

Russia has incited genocide in Ukraine, independent legal experts conclude

The Washington Post reports: Russia is responsible for inciting genocide and perpetrating atrocities that show an “intent to destroy” the Ukrainian people, a new legal analysis signed by more than 30 independent experts concluded. The report, published Friday by the Washington-based New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy and the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, also concludes that there is “serious risk of genocide in Ukraine,” and that states have a legal obligation to prevent genocide from occurring….

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Global food supply: ‘An absolute crisis is unfolding before our eyes’

Global food supply: ‘An absolute crisis is unfolding before our eyes’

Simon Tisdall reports: Apocalypse is an alarming idea, commonly taken to denote catastrophic destruction foreshadowing the end of the world. But in the original Greek, apokálypsis means a revelation or an uncovering. One vernacular definition is “to take the lid off something”. That latter feat is exactly what Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, achieved last week, possibly inadvertently, when he suggested Britain was facing “apocalyptic” levels of food price inflation. Tory ministers fumed over what they saw…

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We need to take back our privacy

We need to take back our privacy

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Over 130 years ago, a young lawyer saw an amazing new gadget and had a revolutionary vision — technology can threaten our privacy. “Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person,” wrote the lawyer, Louis Brandeis, warning that laws needed to keep up with technology and new means of surveillance, or Americans would lose their “right to be let alone.” Decades later, the right…

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How Islam settled Roe v. Wade centuries ago

How Islam settled Roe v. Wade centuries ago

Rashad Ali and Anna Lekas Miller write: As soon as the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, familiar — and troubling — Islamophobic tropes began to emerge in the discourse. “America’s Taliban really hates women and minorities,” wrote Daily Beast editor Naveed Jamali on Twitter, harkening back to late September when dozens of commentators, including MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, started referring to Texas lawmakers as the “American Taliban” — a trope that…

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The banks collapsed in 2008. Our food system is about to do the same

The banks collapsed in 2008. Our food system is about to do the same

George Monbiot writes: For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008. While financial collapse would have been devastating to human welfare, food system collapse doesn’t bear thinking about. Yet the evidence that something is going badly wrong has been escalating rapidly. The current surge in food prices looks like the latest sign of…

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Uyghur county in China has the highest prison rate in the world

Uyghur county in China has the highest prison rate in the world

The Associated Press reports: Nearly one in 25 people in a county in the Uyghur heartland of China has been sentenced to prison on terrorism-related charges, in what is the highest known imprisonment rate in the world, an Associated Press review of leaked data shows. A list obtained and partially verified by the AP cites the names of more than 10,000 Uyghurs sent to prison in just Konasheher county alone, one of dozens in southern Xinjiang. In recent years, China…

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