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From the Los Angeles Times

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Japan faces soaring number of feared dead

One police official says the toll could hit 10,000 in his prefecture alone. The reeling nation also contends with a possible meltdown in at least one reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. Dozens are believed to have been exposed to radiation.

by Laura King, Mark Magnier and Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

March 13, 2011

Reporting from Tokyo, Koriyama and Fukushima,

The number of missing and feared dead in Japan's epic earthquake soared Sunday as a reeling nation struggled to contain an unprecedented nuclear crisis, pluck people in tsunami-inundated areas to safety, quell raging blazes and provide aid to hundreds of thousands of frightened people left homeless and dazed.

A police chief in the battered Miyagi prefecture told disaster relief officials that he expected the death toll to rise to 10,000 in his prefecture alone, the Kyodo News Agency said.

As the second full post-quake day dawned, authorities said about 400,000 people had been forced to flee the giant swath of destruction -- more than half of them evacuees from the area surrounding the Fukushima nuclear complex, 150 miles north of Tokyo. The crisis intensified as officials reported that three of the six reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 plant were in trouble, and that for second day in a row, a building housing one of the reactors could explode.

Photos: Scenes from the earthquake

The country's chief Cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, was quoted by a news agency as saying that a meltdown may have occurred in at least one nuclear power reactor and that authorities are concerned about the possibility of a meltdown at a second reactor.

"Even if a blast were to occur in the building containing the [other] reactor, the government doesn't think the levels of radiation would affect the health of residents who have evacuated the area," Edano said. "But the fact that we can't rule out the possibility of a blast is likely to cause some concerns."

Dozens of people were believed to have been exposed to elevated levels of radiation, but officials sought to reassure the public that there was no significant health risk to the general population, even though cesium and iodine, byproducts of nuclear fission, were detected around the plant. The incident could rank as the worst atomic accident in Japan's roughly half-century of nuclear power generation.

Videos of the earthquake

"Everybody in my neighborhood is being evacuated," said Teruko Tsuchiya, 53, who lives four miles from the nuclear plant and was lining-up outside a 7-11 convenience store waiting for food. "The buses are going back and forth. People are scared of course but they are trying to stay calm and it is proceeding in an orderly fashion."

Tsuchiya said people had enough blankets to get through the frigid nights, but worried many would start going hungry.

With punishing aftershocks continuing to jolt the quake zone, the Japan Meteorological Agency revised the magnitude of the earthquake to 9.0, Kyodo News agency said. The upgrade made the quake one of the largest ever recorded in terms of magnitude.

Adding to the urgency of rescue efforts, the agency said there was a 70% probability of a magnitude-7 quake in the next three days.

The Japanese military was mobilizing 100,000 of its personnel, together with ships and planes, for a rescue effort that is a race against time. In a country where every modern convenience has long extended into even remote areas, the basics of daily survival -- food, water, power -- were unaccustomedly threatened.

Even in Tokyo, where the damage was limited, the rhythms of a normally throbbing metropolis were stilled. In many central districts, the trademark neon blaze was absent on streets that were eerily deserted. The subway system was running again, if sporadically, but on a Saturday evening, when its cars would normally be packed with passengers, some slid through stations all but empty, like ghost trains.

As of early Sunday, the confirmed death toll stood at 963, the Kyodo agency reported, citing police figures. It's unclear if that included another 200 to 300 unidentified corpses, mostly tsunami victims, that had been transported to Sendai, the hardest-hit big city.

"It is believed that more than 1,000 people have lost their lives," Edano said.

But assessments of the disaster were far from certain. Although the official missing tally stood at 650, in Miyagi prefecture north of Tokyo, officials said Saturday night that there had been no contact with about 10,000 people in the small town of Minamisanriku, more than half its population.

Some people decided to try to get more information about missing relatives on their own. When Tokyo office worker Yuki Ochiai, 25, heard that three-quarters of the 24,000 people living in the northern coastal town of Rikuzentakata were unaccounted for, he headed north to find out the fate of family living there. He rode his motorcycle because roads were impassable by car.

"This is crazy," he said as he stopped to buy water and gas outside of Fukushima, still far from his destination. "One place. The other 18,000 people, they don't know where they are?"

Japan's peacetime military, the Self-Defense Forces, was mobilizing a relief-and-rescue force of 100,000, the Defense Ministry said, including a special unit to help nuclear evacuees. Nearly 200 aircraft and 45 ships were en route or in the tsunami zone, the ministry said.

In one of the unlikeliest rescues, Japanese coast guard reportedly pulled to safety Sunday a 63-year-old man who had been floating on the roof of his home nine miles off the coast of Soma city, in Fukushima.

The U.S. military, whose bases are sometimes an irritant to local Japanese, was also helping in the effort. The Americans said there were no injuries or serious damage at their bases.

The USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, was anchored off the coast of Sendai Sunday, said Stephen Valley, a spokesman for U.S. Forces Japan. The nuclear-powered ship is being used as a floating refueling station for Japanese military and coast guard helicopters flying rescue missions in the area and delivering emergency food supplies.

Whole communities were still under water from the massive tsunami unleashed by the quake, the most powerful in Japan's recorded history. Those included Rikuzentakata and the smaller town of Miyako, both in Iwate prefecture.

Despite Japan's much-vaunted earthquake engineering, which saved countless lives, at least 3,400 buildings were known to have been destroyed by the quake and fires, Kyodo News said, citing the national fire agency. But that figure too could grow exponentially. In the town of Kesennuma, in Miyagi prefecture, fires merged into a mega-blaze stretching for more than half a mile. The welfare ministry said 171 "welfare facilities," such as nursing homes, had suffered damage.

Adding to the urgency, nearly 6 million homes were reported to be without electricity, and more than 1 million lacked water.

Long lines formed outside stores that were open and selling packaged foods. Many stores limited the amount that each person could purchase.

Residents who were on medication for high blood pressure and other ailments said they worried about the shortage of drugs.

The populace was further traumatized by aftershocks, one of them magnitude 6.7.

The disaster's economic toll has yet to be fully assessed. Manufacturing heavyweights such as Toyota, Nissan and Honda said production at plants well outside the quake zone were expected to be suspended Monday because of the difficulty in obtaining parts.

Flights resumed at Tokyo's Narita airport, one of the world's busiest, but its terminals were quiet, and hundreds of domestic flights were canceled. Piles of neatly stacked sleeping bags stood as testament to the long wait endured by many to either catch a plane out or find a way into the city aboard the slower-moving local trains instead of the usual speedy express. Service on the country's iconic Shinkansen, or bullet train, remained sharply curtailed. Nine major expressways were closed because of structural concerns.

Tokyo Disneyland said it would be shuttered for at least 10 days.

Japan's central bank announced Sunday that it had given $670 million to banks in the disaster zones.

At the crippled nuclear complex in Fukushima, authorities were still unable to explain why excess levels of radiation were detected outside the grounds. An explosion was heard near a reactor at the No. 1 plant about 3:30 p.m. Saturday, and plumes of white smoke could be seen.

Edano, the Cabinet secretary, said the blast was caused by a buildup of hydrogen in the cooling system, and described the attempt to evacuate about 200,000 people from the area as a precaution.

Japan's nuclear and industrial safety agency said more than 70 people were believed to have been exposed to elevated levels of radiation, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported. Most were waiting to be airlifted from a field at the high school in Futaba, near Fukushima.

On Sunday, the cooling system at a third reactor at the Fukushima plant was reported to be malfunctioning as well and at risk of exploding much the way a sister reactor did Saturday because of hydrogen build-up, Edano said in an afternoon press briefing.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan instructed the president of Toshiba Corp., the maker of the damaged reactors, to assist in the crisis at the plant, the Kyodo agency reported.

The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna said it was told by Japanese officials that they would distribute iodine tablets to residents near the plant. Iodine is known to protect against thyroid cancer that can develop from radiation poisoning.

The biggest concern about the plant is the possibility of the core overheating and nuclear material escaping from the containment vessel.

When the earthquake struck Friday afternoon, the reactors automatically shut down as they were supposed to, a safety measure built into their design. But cooling systems -- which were supposed to remain on -- apparently failed because of the low electrical power. Four backup diesel generators to supply emergency power also failed.

On Saturday, officials said that the plant's engineers used seawater in an attempt to cool the reactors. They released steam containing low levels of radiation as an emergency cooling measure.

Japan relies on nuclear power for 30% of its electricity generation.

"Japan is an earthquake-prone archipelago, and lining its waterfront are 54 nuclear plants. It's been like a suicide bomber wearing grenades around his belt," said Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a professor emeritus at Kobe University.

Ishibashi served on a committee setting safety guidelines for Japan's nuclear reactors in 2005, but resigned because he felt people weren't heeding his warnings about the potential for a disaster.

In 2007, another nuclear plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, suffered serious damage in an earthquake.

Since Friday's quake, a dozen of the country's reactors have been shut down, sharply reducing the power supply to the country. Authorities have been urging civilians to conserve power during the crisis.

Even many miles from the quake zone, the ripple effect of disrupted supply was being felt, and fuel had grown scarce closer to the epicenter. At a gas station in Shimizu, a few miles outside Fukushima, there was a 10-liter limit per vehicle. Even so, said attendant Hiromi Shimura, "we'll probably run out by later today."

On the only major road north from Tokyo that was still open, convenience store shelves were bare, having been stripped the day before.

"The rice is gone. Then people bought all the bread. The factories are closed. We can't get any more stock," said Tasaomi Tamura, a 35-year-old clerk at a store on the outskirts of Utsunomiya.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-quake-main-20110313,0,1314240,print.story

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Japan earthquake shifted Earth on its axis

Scientists in Pasadena say data from the temblor will show how Earth is deformed during massive earthquakes at sites where one plate is sliding under the other, including the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

by Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times

March 12, 2011

Friday's magnitude 8.9 earthquake in Japan shifted Earth on its axis and shortened the length of a day by a hair. In the future, scientists said, it will provide an unusually precise view of how Earth is deformed during massive earthquakes at sites where one plate is sliding under another, including the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

The unusually rich detail comes from an extensive network of sensors that were placed at sites across Japan after that country's Kobe earthquake of 1995, a magnitude 6.8 quake that killed more than 6,000 people because its epicenter was near a major city.

"The Japanese have the best seismic information in the world," said Lucy Jones, chief scientist for the Multi-Hazards project at the U.S. Geological Survey, at a Saturday news conference at Caltech in Pasadena. "This is overwhelmingly the best-recorded great earthquake ever."

Already, just over 36 hours after the quake, data-crunchers had determined that the temblor's force moved parts of eastern Japan as much as 12 feet closer to North America, scientists said — and that Japan has shifted downward about two feet.

Jones said that USGS had determined that the entire earthquake sequence — including associated foreshocks and aftershocks — had so far included 200 temblors of magnitude 5 or larger, 20 of which occurred before the big quake hit. She said the aftershocks were continuing at a rapid pace and decreasing in frequency although not in magnitude, all of which is to be expected.

Researchers have a laundry list of items they hope to gather data on.

Caltech geophysicist Mark Simons said that knowing how much the land had shifted during the quake and its aftershocks would help scientists understand future hazards in the region and allow them to plan accordingly.

A colleague of his, Caltech seismological engineer Tom Heaton, said the tragedy would provide unprecedented information about how buildings hold up under long periods of shaking — and thus how to build them better.

"We had very little information about that before now," he said. Though precise numbers are not yet available, he predicted that the data would show that buildings in Japan were subject to a full three minutes of shaking.

Many of the lessons, however, will apply to other parts of the world than California, because the state's fault topography is different than the one involved in the Japanese quake. The earthquake that struck the New Zealand city of Christchurch on Feb. 22 is probably more analogous to what is likely to occur in California, because it occurred along a fault running very close to an urban area.

The data from the Japanese temblor could help planners and engineers avert potential earthquake disasters around the world, the scientists said — including in the Pacific Northwest, where the Cascadia Subduction Zone extends 600 miles south from British Columbia.

Photos: Scenes from the earthquake

Geological evidence as well as historical records of tsunami deaths in Japan — from giant waves believed, based on modern analysis, to have come from a Cascadia quake — suggest that the most recent large earthquake in the Pacific Northwest occurred in 1700. It was probably larger than Friday's earthquake in Japan.

Another massive quake in the Pacific Northwest is "inevitable," the USGS's Jones said, though it may not occur for hundreds of years.

"They have an opportunity," she said. "This will help the Pacific Northwest understand what they should be ready for. I wouldn't be sleepless in Seattle, but I'd be studious."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-japan-quake-science-20110313,0,6954908,print.story

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Japan quake preparedness no match for 8.9

In a nation where earthquake drills are part of the culture, human emotion nevertheless took over when the quake and tsunami struck.

by Kenji Hall and Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times

March 12, 2011

Reporting from Tokyo and Los Angeles

Earthquakes dwell deep in the Japanese imagination.

No country may be better prepared for a major earthquake than Japan. Seismic standards for construction are among the strictest in the world. From a young age, Japanese learn to dive under desks to protect themselves in a quake. The nation has a state-of-the-art tsunami warning system.

That preparation undoubtedly saved many lives Friday, when a magnitude 8.9 earthquake struck off Japan's main island, shaking buildings in a large swath of the country and sending a 30-foot tsunami onto a populated stretch of coast.

But an uncomfortable truth may emerge from this quake, which killed hundreds of people and caused damage that could mount into the hundreds of billions of dollars. The lesson is that there's only so much that disaster preparedness can do. At some point, humans — even those in an affluent society with 21st century technology and peerless infrastructure — respond to deeper need to panic or flee.

The scenes from Japan captured the almost incomprehensible power of one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. The tsunami swept away houses, cars and ships like so much debris in a storm channel. Roads split apart; buildings buckled. And faces registered the shock and bewilderment of people whose disaster training vaporized in the violence of the moment.

"The people in my office were frozen," said Shinji Tanaka, who works at an information technology company in Tokyo. "Nobody had any idea what to do."

Every year, Japan observes Disaster Prevention Day to commemorate the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which killed more than 100,000 people in and around Tokyo. That disaster, along with the 1995 quake in Kobe, which killed more than 6,000 people, are as drilled into Japanese memory as World War II , and discussed far more openly.

In August, the annual drill was built around a scenario in which a major earthquake kills 25,000 people and destroys 550,000 buildings, an assessment based on a 2003 projection by the Central Disaster Prevention Council.

"For every Japanese, there's the fear of the big one," said Yasunori Ando, 27, a magazine editor who was visiting India when this week's quake struck Japan. "The Hanshin [Kobe] earthquake wasn't in such a populous area, but the big concern is it will occur in Tokyo or Nagoya. You live with a constant fear. Nobody knows if it will come tomorrow, in a year, 10 years or 100 years, but many Japanese know it will come."

The preparations have become part of the culture. Most schools and offices keep helmets handy, as well as first aid kits. Disaster training begins early and can include sessions in earthquake simulators that mimic the effect of a major quake on a building.

Disaster supplies such as reflector blankets, collapsible water containers and hand-cranked cellphones are easily found in convenience and department stores. Neighborhoods are organized with water storage facilities. Parks, shrines and temples are designated as congregation points in case of disaster.

Not all of that preparation came into play Friday. It appears that the tsunami hit too quickly for any warning system to help. Although some people could be seen wearing helmets, most lacked the time or presence of mind to put them on.

And in a country where minor earthquakes occur daily, some people didn't initially recognize the gravity of the situation.

Others did precisely what they had been taught not to do. Videos captured terrified people bolting out of buildings while heavy debris was crashing onto streets and sidewalks. A woman in a grocery store tried to steady a shelving unit that threatened to collapse on her. Office workers stood in place, dumbstruck.

In other ways, the foresight paid off. High-rise buildings could be seen swaying like trees in a strong wind, the intended result of engineering that allowed them to flex in a quake. Tanaka, the IT worker, said that though people initially froze in his office, they soon were jolted into action.

"I got under the desk," he said. "We followed the orders of the person who had been appointed for this sort of thing. We do drills about once a year."

Chieko Yoshida, 26, was in her sixth-floor office in Tokyo when the quake hit at 2:46 p.m.

"We thought it would stop but it didn't," she said. "We all realized that this was different. I turned on the TV on my cellphone and saw that the epicenter was close to Iwate and other areas up north. That's when we heard the security and maintenance staff tell us not to go outside because it was dangerous. Apparently that's common sense. We didn't know, though, because this is the first time we've had such a big earthquake.

"When it hit," she added, "it passed through my mind that this could be the big one. What can you do? There's nothing you can do about it. It's an act of nature. There will be more."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-quake-ready-20110312,0,6042032,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Proposals Could Make It Harder to Leave Prison

Danny Bell sat on a brick ledge outside the plain, beige Greyhound station a block from the prison complex in Huntsville and, from behind dark shades, soaked in the sights and sounds of a world he had not seen in more than two decades.

Mr. Bell spent 21 years in prison for murder, the result of “a youth of ignorance,” he said. He was arrested in 1989 at age 24 and left prison March 4 at age 45 with $100 in his pocket and a bus ticket to Dallas to see his favorite girl: his grandmother. “She ain't gonna let me out of her sight,” Mr. Bell said, flashing a wide smile with one missing front tooth and another capped in gold, with a star cutout in the center.

Even if it meant a job taking out the trash at McDonald's, Mr. Bell said, he was determined to stay out of prison. “You go through too much,” he said.

But like many of the nearly 130 men who walked out of the Walls Unit that day, Mr. Bell had only a vague notion of how to re-enter the free world. He would stay with his grandmother, take any work he could find and get a lawyer to sue the state for keeping him locked up too long — a paperwork mix-up by the state, he said, kept him behind bars an extra 17 months. “I always said to myself I wanted to work with teenagers,” Mr. Bell said, thinking aloud about what kind of career he might like to have.

Bill Kleiber has met and prayed with thousands of Danny Bells in the decade since he got out of prison and started working with the Restorative Justice Ministries Network in Huntsville to help other ex-convicts. They come out hoping never to return, but find few resources to keep them from repeating the mistakes that got them there to begin with.

“It may not be criminal, but it is immoral that we are stranding people like that,” Mr. Kleiber said. What is worse, he said, is that state lawmakers are considering major cuts to fledgling re-entry programs.

Texas legislators, looking for ways to plug an estimated $15 billion to $27 billion budget hole, are considering proposals that would cut as much as $162 million from rehabilitation and treatment programs meant to help criminals avoid going back to prison. For instance, the $100 Danny Bell received when he was released — the so-called gate money handed to prisoners who have completed their sentence — would be cut in half. Financing for Project Reintegration of Offenders, known as Project RIO, which helps released inmates find jobs, would be eliminated. So would money for educational and vocational programs in prisons and for re-entry transition coordinators. Financing for substance abuse and mental health treatment programs would drop sharply.

Criminal-justice advocates say the cuts would reverse years of reforms in Texas that have helped reduce recidivism and drive down the size of the prison population. “We're taking away the basic tools that they need to live responsibly,” said Ana Yáñez-Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group.

The state initiated its reforms in 2007 after lawmakers got some stunning news: Budget writers estimated that the state would need some 17,000 additional prison beds by 2012. It would cost about $2 billion over five years to build and maintain enough capacity. The expected growth was attributed to high probation revocation rates, low parole rates and a lack of access to treatment programs in and out of prison.

Legislators decided to try a new approach. Instead of building more prisons, they invested $241 million in community treatment and diversion programs meant to keep nonviolent offenders out of prison and to ensure that those who served their sentences would not come back.

More felony offenders were put on probation, and more prisoners who qualified were released on parole. As access to treatment improved and probation and parole officers had options to impose intermediate sanctions, fewer offenders were sent back to prison. Last year, Texas had the lowest parole revocation rate of the decade, with about 8 percent of parolees returning to prison. The state's crime rate dropped to the lowest level since 1973, even as the population rose. There are about 7,000 fewer inmates in Texas prisons now than the number that had been projected in the alarming 2007 report.

Tony Fabelo, research director at the Council of State Governments Justice Center, told lawmakers at a recent hearing that the cuts they are considering would undo that progress. Prison population, Mr. Fabelo said, would rise. Crime rates would spike. By 2013, he said, the state could be short about 8,600 beds.

Compounding the problem, he said, are plans to close prisons at the same time that treatment and diversion programs are cut. Troubling, too, are proposals to trim other areas of the budget like mental health and substance abuse treatment, public education and jobs programs.

“You're really going to have a perfect storm developing,” Mr. Fabelo said.

Representative Jerry Madden, Republican of Plano and chairman of the House Corrections Committee, was a chief architect of the endangered criminal-justice reforms. He said he planned to fight to keep every dollar Texas had invested in re-entry, treatment and diversion programs.

“The statistics clearly indicate we're doing a better job,” Mr. Madden said.

Inside the dingy store adjoining the Greyhound bus station where Mr. Bell waited for his ride to Dallas, just-released inmates stood nervously in line to cash their gate money checks. They rummaged through piles of used clothes and shoes: $2.99 for an orange polo shirt, $4.99 for a pair of jeans, $22.73 for tennis shoes, $3 for sunglasses. They dropped coins into dusty vending machines that popped out bottles of Dr Pepper and bags of Cheetos.

Many of them bought cigarettes. Adrian —who did not give his last name — took long, slow drags as he sat on a bench near the bus that would take him home to Houston. At 25, he had just finished a five-year sentence for dealing drugs. It was not his first time in jail; he had spent a chunk of his teens in state youth lockups. Like most of the other inmates fresh out of prison, Adrian said all that was behind him now. “That's something I'll never do again,” he said.

He pulled out a small stack of photos of a ponytailed girl with a bright smile. Five-year-old Adrianna, he said, was his motivation. His plan was to go to college, to learn construction and management like his father, maybe even run his own business. Hard time, Adrian said, had changed him mentally.

While at the Allred Unit in Iowa Park, Adrian wrote a song about his experiences and titled it “Help.”

“This is the sea of life, and I'm drowning,” he rapped, nodding his head in rhythm with the words. “I know I can swim, but it seems like I keep sinking down. In these waters I can't breathe; it seems like I'm going to blow it. I can see people holding a life jacket, but they won't throw it. Entertained by my pain, and they would love to see me die. Why not love to see me live?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/us/13ttinmates.html?ref=us

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From Google News

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COMMENTARY: Women's Day slipped by too quietly considering oppression

International Women's Day

STOP THE HORROR

by Anonymous

International Women's Day went by this week with nary a mention in the media, much less the kind of front page recognition that comes with other people's “Days” – though you gotta love Steven Tyler for giving it a shout out during American Idol on Wednesday night.

Any “Day” for women with global scope cries out for an answer to the question, “Is there an issue of such global magnitude, it deserves to be prioritized for special attention on International Women's Day?”

There are plenty of issues from which to choose: Domestic and sexual violence, unequal pay, “honor” killings, forced marriages, female genital mutilation, sex trafficking, etc. Some countries have bigger problems than others but even in the United States where we hold ourselves out as having the best legal system on the planet, women are too often brutalized with impunity. Just last month, it was reported that 344 sexual assaults were reported to New Hampshire police in 2006, but very few were prosecuted – and only 13 ended in conviction.

If this is what the best legal system has to offer – just imagine the unconscionable things going on in nations with far fewer resources, struggling economies and cultures where women are coerced into subjugation through laws that legitimize unfair treatment.

Actually, don't bother with your imagination. Even your wildest nightmares may not be capable of conjuring up what's going on in China at this very moment.

The Chinese government has adopted a “One Child Policy” – imposed on women through forced abortions, compulsory sterilizations and outright infanticide. This policy causes more violence to women and girls than any other official policy on earth, and, according to “Women's Rights Without Frontiers” founder Reggie Littlejohn, is the driving force behind sexual slavery in China and sex trafficking across Asia.

Women in China are required to have “Birth Permits” and are hunted down by the “Family Planning” police if there's so much as a rumor of pregnancy without government permission. When a noncompliant woman is captured, she is taken to a facility where pregnant women are lined up like pigs in a slaughterhouse, sometimes 100 at a time, waiting to be injected with a drug to induce labor no matter how far along the pregnancy. To prevent a live birth, government officials often inject an 8-inch needle through the woman's abdomen – straight into the skull of the unborn child. The “birth” of a dead baby soon follows. This happens over 10,000 times every year.

Referring to the policy as a form of “gendercide,” Littlejohn says that China's “One Child” rule has created a grotesquely lopsided population such that there are now 37 million more men than women. That's four times greater than the entire population of New York City.

No surprise then that approximately 500 women take their own lives every day in China – the highest female suicide rate of any country in the world.

If the political leadership in this country really cared about human rights, as it claims it does, it would condemn China for this craziness, no matter how debt-entrapped we are to such barbarians. In so doing, it would follow the lead of individuals with far less power who have dared to speak out in similar situations.

Like the 12-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia who filed for divorce from her 80-year-old husband – to whom she was forcibly “married” – even though she had no legal right to do so. Like the people in Somalia who risked their lives to speak out against the stoning death of a woman who was killed because she had been raped. Like the Muslim woman in New Jersey who fought for a restraining order even though her husband's religious Imam testified that a husband has a right to rape his wife under Sharia law. Like the rape victim in Canada who only last month publicly lambasted a judge for sentencing her attacker to probation because, he said, she “asked for sex” by wearing a tube top on a hot summer night.

If International Women's Day means anything beyond polite celebrations of women's achievements, it should mean that men and women alike will stand together, for at least one day, in protest against a government that forces a woman to submit to the piercing of her uterus, to cause the death of her beloved unborn child. Population control isn't easy but forced abortion should be the last choice of any government – even if it's the cheapest option – because it's by far the most costly to women's humanity.

http://www.enterprisenews.com/opinions/x1664569921/COMMENTARY-Women-s-Day-slipped-by-too-quietly-considering-oppression#axzz1GUNMBwPM

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Red Cross warns of hoax emails concerning missing Japanese earthquake victims

The International Red Cross, Red Crescent has warned email users to be vigilant of hoax emails purporting to be from, or in aid of, victims of the Japanese earthquake.

The warning was posted on the International Red Cross, Red Crescent's FamilyLinks web service website. This is a free service from the Red Cross, Red Crescent organisation which attempts to connect family and friends who have been separated due to the earthquake and tsunami. It is similar to Google's People Finder.

You may receive fraudulent e-mails regarding missing persons. If a stranger contacts you asking for money, please notify us immediately by E-mail.

http://sociable.co/2011/03/13/red-cross-warns-of-hoax-emails-concerning-missing-japanese-earthquake-victims/

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