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fatehbaz · 2 years

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Why should low-carbon projects be permitted to destroy legendary Native American sacred sites? Yakama elders witnessed the construction of The Dalles Dam that flooded and silenced Celilo Falls on the Columbia River. Since time immemorial, Celilo Falls was one of history’s great marketplaces. Multiple tribes had permanent villages near the falls. Thousands of people gathered annually to trade, feast, and participate in games and religious ceremonies over millennia. During spring, this natural monument surged up to 10 times the amount of water that passes over Niagara Falls today.

What must Indigenous people continue to sacrifice for energy development? The Seattle Times editorial board recently announced support for the Goldendale pumped-storage hydroelectric project to benefit the state’s clean-energy portfolio [“Goldendale energy project can help meet state’s clean-energy needs,” Sept. 2, Opinion]. The board constructed an alternate reality where tribal nations could find common ground with the developer and resolve objections to project construction. The board wrote, “A compromise that would allow the project to go forward while respecting tribal concerns would be a benefit for all.” The board ignores the realities of Native American history and the history of this project, which the Confederated Tribes and Bands of Yakama Nation (Yakama Nation) have objected to from the initial development proposal at this site.

The project site is situated on Pushpum — a sacred site to the Yakama Nation, a place where there is an abundance of traditional foods and medicines. The developer’s footprint proposes excavation and trenching over identified Indigenous Traditional Cultural Properties, historic and archaeological resources and access to exercise ceremonial practices and treaty-gathering rights.

Notably, the project site covers the ancestral village site of the Willa-witz-pum Band and the Yakama fishing site called As’num, where Yakama tribal fishermen continue to practice their treaty-fishing rights.

Yakama Nation opposes the development. The developer proposes two, approximately 60-acre reservoirs and associated energy infrastructure within the Columbia Hills near the John Day Dam and an existing wind turbine complex. The majority of the nearly 700 acre site is undeveloped; the lower reservoir would be located on a portion of the former Columbia Gorge Aluminum smelter site. The tribe’s treaty-reserved right to exercise gathering, fishing, ceremony and passing of traditions in the area of the proposed project has existed since time immemorial. The tribe studied mitigation; it is impossible at this site.

Columbia Riverkeeper, and more than a dozen other nonprofits, stand in solidarity with Yakama Nation and oppose the development: The climate crisis does not absolve our moral and ethical responsibilities. Both tribal nations and environmental organizations have worked tirelessly to stop fossil fuel developments and secure monumental climate legislation in the Pacific Northwest. But we refuse to support a sacrifice zone to destroy Native American cultural and sacred sites in the name of combating climate change.

Environmental justice is on the line with the pumped-storage development. Seventeen tribal leaders sent a letter to Gov. Jay Inslee, urging him to reject development permits. The leaders explained, “Our ancestors signed Treaties with the United States, often under threat of violence and death, in exchange for our ancestral lands and sacred places. Through these treaties, we retain the rights to practice and live in our traditional ways in these places. Yet, the promises made by the government have been broken time and time again.”

Earlier this year, the Washington State Office of Equity, located within the governor’s office, released the state’s inaugural five-year Washington State Pro-Equity Anti-Racism Plan & Playbook. Gov. Inslee stated, “We will no longer replicate and reinforce systems, processes and behaviors that lead to inequities and disparities among various communities.” Now is the time to apply the playbook to climate change and energy siting.

There is no room for compromise. The choice is stark: Continue to advance our nation’s and state’s history of sacrificing Indigenous resources through broken promises, or work with tribes committed to tackling the climate crisis while, at the same time, protecting the last remaining sacred sites.

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Text by: Jeremy Takala and Lauren Goldberg. “Stop sacrificing Indigenous sacred sites in the name of climate change.” The Seattle Times. 25 September 2022.

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calabria-mediterranea · 5 days

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25 April - Anniversary of Italy's Liberation

25 April also known as the Anniversary of Italy's Liberation is a national holiday in Italy that commemorates the victory of the Italian resistance movement against Nazi Germany and the Italian Social Republic, puppet state of the Nazis and rump state of the fascists, culmination of the liberation of Italy from German occupation and of the Italian civil war in the latter phase of World War II. That is distinct from Republic Day (Festa della Repubblica), which takes place on 2 June and commemorates the 1946 Italian institutional referendum.

Every year on 25 April Italy celebrates Liberation Day, known in Italian as Festa della Liberazione, with a national public holiday.

In addition to the closure of schools, public offices and most shops, the day is marked with parades across the country, organised by ANPI, Italy's partisan association which preserves the memory of the Resistance movement against Fascism.

The occasion is held in commemoration of the end of the Fascist regime and of the Nazi occupation during world war two, as well as the victory of Italy's Resistance movement of partisans who opposed the regime.

Formed in 1943, the partigiani comprised a network of anti-Fascist activists, from diverse backgrounds including workers, farmers, students and intellectuals, across Italy.

Resistance

Together they united in armed resistance against the Nazi occupation and the Fascist regime, making their struggle both a war of liberation and a civil war.

The annual event marks the day in 1945 when a nationwide radio broadcast calling for a popular uprising and general strike against the Nazi occupation and Fascist regime was announced by the National Liberation Committee of Upper Italy (CLNAI), a political umbrella organisation representing the Italian Resistance movement.

This announcement - made by partisan and future president of Italy Sandro Pertini - resulted in the capture and death of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, who was shot three days later.

The Festa della Liberazione represents a significant turning point in Italy's history, paving the way for the referendum of 2 June 1946 when Italians voted in favour of a republic and against the monarchy which had been discredited during the war and whose members went into exile.

Scurati controversy

This year's event takes place against the backdrop of a political controversy after the state broadcaster RAI stopped a well-known Italian writer from delivering an anti-fascist monologue on television a few days before the Festa della Liberazione.

Antonio Scurati accused RAI of censorship after his monologue was dropped abruptly from the Saturday night talkshow Chesarà for "editorial reasons".

The writer claimed that the move highlighted the alleged attempts by premier Giorgia Meloni's right-wing government to exert its influence over the state broadcaster which has seen several veteran presenters leave over the last year including Fabio Fazio, Bianca Berlinguer and Amadeus.

In his speech Scurati criticised the "ruling post-Fascist party" for wanting to "re-write history" rather than "repudiate its neo-fascist past".

RAI director Paolo Corsini rejected any talk of censorship, as did Meloni who responded to the controversy by posting Scurati's text on her Facebook page, stating that the broadcaster had "simply refused to pay 1800 euro (the monthly salary of many employees) for a minute of monologue".

Meloni added that the Italian people "can freely judge" the contents of the text which was later read live on air by Chesarà presenter Serena Bortone in an act of solidarity with Scurati.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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The Cory Doctorow Humble Bundle

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

It's been 21 years and 29 days since Tor Books published my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In the years since, Tor has published every one of my novels, sending me around the USA and Canada to talk about them. Now, they've teamed up with Humble Bundle to sell 18 of my ebooks on a name-your-price basis, with part of the proceeds going to benefit EFF:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/cory-doctorow-novel-collection-tor-books-books

I've been associated with EFF even longer than I've been published by Tor! My first novel came out while I was working EFF's first-ever booth at CES. I split my time between the booth and my motel room, where I paid $0.25/call to dial up to Earthlink's local number and manage the launch-day publicity. Over the years, I've benefited immensely from Tor's editorial and publicity departments, working with brilliant publishing people like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Patty Garcia, Dot Lin, Laura Etzkorn, Elena Stokes, Sarah Reidy, Lucille Rettino, and of course, Tor founder Tom Doherty.

But I like to think that it was a two-way street. Tor and I have come a long way together on ebooks: most visibly, they allowed me to publish several novels under Creative Commons licenses (my first book was the first ever CC book, coming out just weeks after the licenses themselves launched). As my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden said at the time, "Ebooks have the worst hours-in-meeting-to-dollars-in-revenue ratio of anything in my publishing career. Why not?"

https://craphound.com/down/download/

Just as important – but less visible – was Tor's willingness to let me insist that all my books be published without DRM, meaning that anything you buy on say, Amazon, can be moved to any reader program if you decide to start getting your ebooks elsewhere. This worked so well that in 2012, Tor became the first major publisher in the world to ban DRM on all its ebooks, flying me, John Scalzi and Charlie Stross to New York City to announce it this at a big, splashy event at Book Expo America:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130512022634/https://tor.com/blogs/2012/06/tor-books-announces-e-book-store-doctorow-scalzi-a-stross-talk-drm-free

Tor's unique status as the sole major DRM-free publisher in the world was well timed! That same year, I curated the very first Humble Ebook Bundle, which was very top-heavy with Tor titles, and raised more than $1,000,000 for the writers, publishers and charities associated with it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121017215636/http://www.humblebundle.com/

That opened the floodgates to a series of Humble Bundles, tempting other major publishers to dabble with DRM-free, including Simon and Schuster:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-I5QyAfglU

And Harpercollins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHMLfeCrCrE

Now, 12 years after that inaugural Humble Ebook Bundle, I find myself honored by being the subject of a bundle of my own (it helps that I've written a hell of a lot of books in the intervening years). Included in the bundle are (nearly) all of my Tor novels and novellas: The Lost Cause; "The Canadian Miracle" (a Lost Cause story); Red Team Blues; Radicalized; Walkaway; "Party Discipline" (a Walkaway story); Pirate Cinema; Rapture of the Nerds (with Charlie Stross); For The Win; Makers; Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town; Eastern Standard Tribe, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother, Homeland, Attack Surface, and "Lawful Interception" (a Little Brother story).

(The sole exclusion is The Bezzle, which came out two weeks ago and is already a USA Today national bestseller!)

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Also included in the bundle is Poesy the Monster Slayer, my 2020 picture book for the littlies:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627/poesythemonsterslayer

All these books are delivered as DRM-free epub files. The Bundle runs for the next three weeks, and the minimum buy-in is $18 – that's just $1/book (full retail value is $187). Of course, you can name a higher price, and, as with all Humble Bundles, you can adjust the final split to share out the money between me, EFF, and the Humble folks.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/03/humbly-bundled/#eff-too

#pluralistic #ebooks #publishing #science fiction #tor books #tor #macmillan #drm #drm-free #eff #electronic frontier foundation

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feminismisstillahatemovement · 2 months

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Purely by chance found myself reading the "45 Current Communist Goals" list that was read out in the U.S. House of Representatives and into the Congressional Record by Democrat representative A. S. Herlong on January 10th, 1963.

Some of the stated goals are not so pressing since the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union, but the following ones seem far more pertinent today, 61 years on.

I'd be tempted to dismiss the list as simply "Red-Scare"-era hysteria, were it not for the fact they've all, fairly undeniably, come true: --------------------------------

Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

Gain control of all student newspapers.

Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.

Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.

Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy.”

Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a "religious crutch."

Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old- fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture."

Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].

Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use "united force" to solve economic, political or social problems.

#communism #russia #politics #how we got where we are

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strangebiology · 4 months

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How Funding Affected my Journalism Jobs

The different places I’ve worked as a journalist, and in related fields, have all had different funding. Here are my experiences at different places–and it seems to me that grant-funded stuff is the best.

Internship at Nat Geo

Grants sponsored both of the other interns, but not me. Nat Geo makes a lot of its money through things like books at TV.

Mine was low-paid, but probably normal for an internship in 2016? LOVED the experience. Freelance at Nat Geo afterward was MUCH better paid. $14/hour part-time. IDK how much the grant-funded interns made. 2016.

Fellowship at PBS Newshour

A grant from the National Science Foundation funded me, but PBS is state-sponsored media. Interestingly, that’s a huge red flag in China and Russia, but I found the US-funded Public Broadcasting Service very fair to its subjects. Good experience, but even worse pay, at $13/hour full-time. 2016-2017

Job at Newsweek

Their funding is from clicks. This place was crazy bad and paid garbage. Everyone hated it and almost everyone quit, unless they were being fired for making a living wage. Some people even got fired for accurately reporting on the company itself on assignment from their editors–there was no obscuring it, that was cited as their reason for termitation. Newsweek is Hellfire and damnation. I suspect the nonsense demand for 5 stories/day/person and silly demand that we make them go viral stemmed from the following: the fact that the company primarily made its money from clicks and higher-ups didn’t appear to care about the long-term reputation of the company or its reporters, and perhaps an ego-fueled refusal to try to understand what actually got clicks. $39k/year. 2017-2018

Freelance at VOX

Funded by clicks/ads and grants at the time, but halfway through they started a contribution campaign. The difference I noticed between VOX and Newsweek was that VOX practices were smarter and they actually paid attention to analytics and sane business practices. Also, it's much easier to qualify for and get grants if you're actually doing good journalism, so I don't believe that Newsweek's policy of "lots of garbage" was actually business-savvy in any way.

Vox was a good experience, even though I wasn’t working as a journalist, but doing SEO/social media for journalists. $35/hour, then $50/hour part-time. Then I was laid off due to the pandemic. 2019-2020

Freelance at Alzheimer's Association

Remote, not really journalism, but I liked it anyway. Nonprofit, so, funded by donations and grants. $65/hour part-time. 2021

Job at Bay Nature

My job was entirely funded by a grant. Odd situation–I got the grant and I could bring it to any legit journalism employer. Bay Nature was supposed to contribute 40% of my salary but flexibility happened and they just paid health insurance and such. They got basically no money at all from clicks, like, pennies a year. Not much from subscriptions. They have fundraisers, and at the time, there were 3 writers/editors and 2 fundraisers on staff. Later they hired another writer whose entire salary was paid by a philanthropist, and then I’m told they got another salary funded by a UC Berkeley journalism grant program. So, like half of their editorial staff was grant-funded.

Great experience, but low pay for the Bay Area. $50k/year, all from Poynter-Koch, 2021-2022.

Freelance at Politifact

A nonprofit and they probably get lots of grants. My particular position was also funded by a grant entirely. Loved it. $250/article fact check. 2022.

Book

REALLY love it. $50k is from MIT Press, which is a not-for-profit, and it gets some grants and endowments. Then I got $56k from a grant from the Sloan Foundation on top.

Future?

I also got $500 (plus gas and hotels) to attend a day of learning with a program called Investing in Wyoming’s Creative Economy, and that means I’m one of 100 people eligible to apply for 10 $25k grants for future projects. The idea is to support creatives to stay in Wyoming and have sustainable businesses here. Maybe do some art that will bring in tourists.

_____________________

Note that a grant sort of does, and sort of doesn’t, mean free money. It means money to support a project that usually has to have a mission and a public good, like educating the public. You don’t pay these back, and the org giving the grants doesn’t require a percentage of the profits or anything. But, for instance, the $50k grant from Poynter-Koch was more like a gift to Bay Nature, so they could pay me, and I worked for a year to actually have the funds.

However, I’m not yet convinced that there is any objectively good funding model to ensure the most fair and accurate journalism. In theory, the capitalistic ones would be the best, but the public desire to read inflammatory stories about how their political enemies are evil, or a different generation is full of idiots, adversely affected the accuracy of headlines at Newsweek IMO.

You might think that the worst funding source would be Poynter-Koch, which is a program run by Poynter and funded by the Charles Koch Institute. But neither Poynter nor Koch even asked me to tell them what I was writing, let alone try to stop me from writing it. (Poynter hosted mentor-led auxiliary groups to talk about our careers/lives and such, so the topics of our articles came up sometimes if we chose to share that.)

Anyway, I’m thinking of writing an article on how funding models affect journalism, for better and worse. There are some high-profile examples of grant funding causing harm. But for now, the above is my experience–pretty much all good, except not enough funding sometimes.

#funding #journalism #not biology

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mariacallous · 6 months

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Even before this week’s deadly hospital blast, Gaza’s health system was already on the brink of collapse. At least 3,700 Palestinians in Gaza have been declared dead since the beginning of the Israeli-Hamas war, and an estimated 12,000 have been injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Gaza’s health system has faced a huge influx of emergency patients, while at the same time suffering the effects of bombardment and having utilities cut.

On October 13, the Israeli military told everyone in the north of Gaza to evacuate. This created an impossible situation for hospitals filled with patients who were too unwell to be moved. The World Health Organization said the evacuation order was a “death sentence” for the sick and injured.

“The whole health system is collapsing around us,” says Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a plastic surgeon with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) who is working in Gaza at Al-Shifa Hospital, the biggest medical facility in the Gaza Strip, located in Gaza City. He paints a picture of a system stripped down to the bare bones.

The orthopedic department has run out of the pins and rods needed to stabilize fractures, Abu-Sittah says. The water pressure has become too weak to run the sterilization machines that disinfect equipment, meaning the hospital staff are forced to rely on a chemical antiseptic that hasn’t been commonly used for decades. There are no ventilators available. There is not even enough room for the injured in the hospital. “There is no more space or mattresses to put the wounded on in the corridors,” says Abu-Sittah. Health care staff are exhausted and are struggling to deal with the overwhelming number of injured.

On October 18, Abu-Sittah helped treat a patient with a wound that had become infected and septic. But with all operating rooms full, doctors could not treat it in time, and the patient will lose a leg as a result.

Since Israel blocked access to electricity in Gaza more than a week ago, hospitals have been relying on backup generators. Now they’re running dangerously low on fuel. The United Nations Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported on Wednesday that Gaza’s Ministry of Health is redistributing fuel from other public facilities to keep hospital generators running. “They’re running out of everything,” says Zaher Sahloul, the president of MedGlobal, an NGO that is supporting medical facilities in Gaza. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said that without electricity, “hospitals risk turning into morgues.”

Surgeons at Al-Shifa Hospital are operating without painkillers, according to Christos Christou, the international president of MSF. MSF team members say that they have “heard wounded patients screaming in pain.”

Al-Shifa is currently working at more than 600 percent over capacity, its director-general Muhammad Abu Salmiya said in an editorial published in The Lancet on October 18. The same day, Abu Salmiya told the Associated Press that the “hospital’s generators would run out within hours.”

Chris Hanger, a spokesperson for the ICRC, told WIRED that surgeons at Al-Shifa Hospital are working 24 hours a day to care for the wounded. “They have told us that the whole system is on its knees as they try and triage patients, but there is no way to manage the number of casualties,” he says. “All surgical theaters are occupied.”

Northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital is receiving “mostly burnt-out bodies, bodies full of shrapnel, mutilated bodies of women and children,” says Sahloul, who is in regular contact with Hussam Abu Safiya, MedGlobal’s lead doctor in northern Gaza. Almost all of their victims are women and children, Sahloul says.

Another concern is that the sheer number of dead bodies may lead to a disease outbreak. “The hospital is overflowing with dead bodies,” Sahloul says. Abu Safiya, the doctor working in northern Gaza, is worried that decomposing bodies will contaminate water and cause a disease outbreak.

On October 18, all five of Gaza’s wastewater treatment plants had been forced to shut down due to a lack of power, according to the UN Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, increasing the risk of waterborne diseases. Al-Shifa Hospital is burying bodies in mass graves.

With limited resources, caring for the most severely injured people has been prioritized. That means patients requiring continuous treatment for cancer and other diseases can no longer be cared for. The Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, located to the south of Gaza City, is on the brink of shutting down, meaning all 9,000 cancer patients in the Gaza Strip will be left without care. “Many of these people will die,” says Sahloul. “Not from the bombing, but from the lack of access to critical medications.”

Following US president Joe Biden’s talks with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it was announced on October 19 that 20 trucks with humanitarian relief deliveries will be allowed to cross the Egypt-Gaza border, carrying food, water, and medical supplies. The aid will start moving Friday at the earliest, according to the White House.

In the meantime, Gaza’s health system will continue to crumble and casualties will continue to rise. Hospitals are so stretched that doctors aren’t able to prevent patients’ from dying, Abu-Sittah says. “You are just an emergency department where people come, and if they are going to survive, they survive, and if they are not, they are dead.”

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haggishlyhagging · 10 months

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By 1850 the husband-killing woman—the household fiend—was no longer a joke. She had become a social problem, and for every husband, potentially a personal one. The question was how to spot her in advance. By the end of the century the new "science" of criminology would confirm that sensual women were likely to be criminals, thus reassuring men—as these mid-century fictions did—that the murderer and the true woman (appearances notwithstanding) were completely different kinds of people. Even, some said, different species: fiends and angels.

The early feminists didn't think so. In a sophisticated attack on marriage, divorce, and property laws, they argued all along that the institution of marriage bound women in desperate circumstances. Even after the Civil War, when the more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association campaigned exclusively for the ballot, the radical Stanton-Anthony wing of the movement continued to attack marriage. In 1868 The Revolution, the official publication of their National Woman Suffrage Association, editorialized:

The ballot is not even half the loaf; it is only a crust—a crumb. The ballot touches only those interests, either of women or men, which take their root in political questions. But woman's chief discontent is not with her political, but with her social, and particularly her marital bondage. The solemn and profound question of marriage . . . is of more vital consequence to woman's welfare, reaches down to a deeper depth in woman's heart, and more thoroughly constitutes the core of the woman's movement, than any such superficial and fragmentary question as woman's suffrage.

Their analysis of marriage led the radicals to conclude that the very structure of the institution might make the people within it murderous.

The institution of marriage is either the greatest curse or the greatest blessing known to society. It brings two people into the closest of all possible relations; it puts them into the same house; it seats them at the same table; it thrusts them into the same sleeping apartment, in short, it forces upon them an intimate and constant companionship from which there is no escape. More than this, it makes any attempt at escape disreputable: the man or woman who seeks to loosen or break the tie which he or she finds intolerable, is frowned upon by society. The fracture of the galling chain must be made at the expense of the reputation of one or both of the parties bound together. There is no hope for two people shackled in the manacles of an unhappy marriage, but a release by death; and no wonder that each desires deliverance, and longs for the death of the other.

Yet what can be more horrible or more degrading to human nature than such a situation. Can anything be more demoralizing than this position of two people living under the same roof, forced into daily and almost hourly companionship, each of whom secretly desires the death of the other.

That the number of people who find marriage intolerable is not small, the annals of crime prove. Wife murders are so common that one can scarcely take up a newspaper without finding one or more instances of this worst of all sins; and none but God can know how many men and women are murderers at heart.

They predicted that as long as "men and women marry in the same old hap-hazard way, learning nothing from each other's experience" the result would be "what one might expect, confusion, misery and crime."

Conservatives counterattacked, turning the argument upside down and using it against all claims to any women's rights, including suffrage. Marriage, they said, was instituted by God, not man; and "woman was created to be a wife and a mother" and "to make home cheerful, bright, and happy." Therefore, any woman who tried to alter woman's sphere or to step out of it in any way—whether by voting or by poisoning her husband—must be "unnatural." A woman living "an independent existence, free to follow her own fancies and vague longings, her own ambition and natural love of power, without masculine direction or control, . . . is out of her element, and a social anomaly, sometimes a hideous monster, which men seldom are, excepting through a woman's influence." In short, it was woman as monster who threatened the institution of marriage and not the other way around.

This conservative argument, backed by the full force of religion and masculine "reason" and soon bolstered by the sciences of criminology and psychology, overwhelmed the tentative and sometimes inconsistent insights of the radical feminists. And when social anthropologists proclaimed the patriarchal nuclear family the most highly evolved and "civilized" form of social organization, feminists seem reactionary and barbaric indeed. So, by the end of the nineteenth century, almost everyone had been converted to the "domestic mythology", and even once-radical feminists campaigned for woman suffrage on the grounds that it would strengthen the American family.

-Ann Jones, Women Who Kill

#ann jones #amerika #american history #womens history #womens suffrage #female killers #love and marriage #patriarchy #nuclear family

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texasobserver · 1 year

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From “Millions of Texans are About to Lose Their Health Insurance” by TXO Winter/Spring Editorial Fellow Sara Hutchinson:

Last November, Tiayana Hardy gave birth to her first child, a baby girl named Laylani.

“She came a week before her due date, but I can’t complain about that,” said Hardy. “She was born healthy, she’s an easy baby, and motherhood is amazing.”

But Hardy has concerns about her future. She is still experiencing bleeding related to the delivery as well as continuing postpartum anxiety. And now the Garland resident is about to lose the Medicaid coverage that got her through her pregnancy.

Hardy is far from alone. An estimated 2.7 million Texans—mostly children and new moms— are expected to lose their Medicaid insurance in the next few months, some as early as June. That’s almost half of all Texans now on the Medicaid rolls. Most of those affected had had their earlier coverage extended by the public health declaration that came during the COVID-19 pandemic. The declaration expires at the end of March.

Now the state must begin a federally mandated review of its entire 5.9 million-member Medicaid caseload. Texans who no longer qualify will lose their coverage, but so could current eligible recipients who fail to complete required paperwork for recertification.

“Advocates are very, very concerned right now,” said Jana Eubank, CEO of the Texas Association of Community Health Centers. “Families aren’t even going to know what’s going on, and they’re just going to lose coverage and show up at a doctor or a health center, and they’re going to be told, ‘Oh, you’re not on Medicaid anymore.’”

For over a year, public health advocates have raised concerns about Texas Health and Human Services’ (HHSC) ability to handle this recertification process, which begins April 1 and is expected to be finished within 12 months. State officials are apparently worried, too: HHSC recently requested an additional $143 million to cover more staff to process the approaching onslaught.

“It’s probably the largest enrollment event, if not the largest enrollment event since the ACA [federal Affordable Care Act],” Eubank said.

Parents Tiayana Hardy and Desmond Gentle pose with their baby, Laylani, born Nov. 30, 2022. Hardy has relied on Medicaid to cover her health care needs since she became pregnant last year, but she’ll lose that coverage once the public health emergency expires.

Medicaid, a federal entitlement program administered by states, provides health insurance for low-income residents who cannot afford private insurance. Nearly half of Texas children depend on the program, as do 51 percent of moms, whose prenatal care and hospital bills are covered.

In this, the most underinsured state in the country, millions of people fall outside of Medicaid coverage due to Texas’ strict eligibility criteria and Republican leaders’ refusal to accept billions of federal dollars to expand the program. The state’s requirements around income eligibility mean the vast majority of working poor Texans make too much to qualify for coverage.

A single mother of two would need to earn less than $4,000 per year to be eligible for Texas Medicaid insurance, while childless adults are ineligible no matter how poor they are. Eligibility requirements ease for single pregnant women, who may make up to $2,243 a month, but that coverage cuts off two months after birth regardless of their care needs.

Despite Republican leaders’ past opposition to any expansion of Medicaid, Texas Speaker of the House Dade Phelan and Governor Greg Abbott both have named postpartum Medicaid expansion as a top priority for this session. But even if it passes, it won’t come soon enough to prevent confusion and distress for low-income families.

Under the national public health emergency initiated by the federal government in March 2020, no Texan who qualified and was enrolled in Medicaid could be dropped from the program. That meant Texas moms like Hardy who would have ordinarily lost their insurance two-months postpartum have been able to maintain their coverage for the duration of the pandemic. The same is true for Texas children who would have aged out of the program.

As a result, the state’s Medicaid rolls grew from 3.5 million before the pandemic to 5.9 million today. Federal dollars provided the financing for this temporary expansion.

But with the public health emergency set to expire, advocates say, families are now scrambling to find new coverage options and navigate a complicated and bureaucratic reenrollment process.

Of particular concern are the millions of Texas children currently enrolled in Medicaid who could miss prescription refills or have to forgo doctor’s visits if their parents are unable to complete the upcoming recertification process. According to state data, 4.2 million Texas children currently rely on Medicaid to access healthcare, up from 2.8 million prior to the pandemic.

“You’re going to go to your pharmacy to get your prescription renewed and they’re going to say, ‘Oh, you don’t have coverage anymore.’ Or you’re going to take your kids for their scheduled well-child visit to get vaccinations for school. And they’re going to say, ‘Oh, you don’t have coverage.’ That’s when they’re going to find out,” said Diana Forester, who oversees health policy at the children’s advocacy nonprofit Texans Care for Children. The organization recently launched a website to help Texans navigate the end of continuous coverage.

#Texas #medicaid expansion #healthcare #poverty #income inequality #health insurance

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osharenippon · 5 months

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Shoujo Manga's Golden Decade (Part 3)

Shoujo manga, comics for girls, played a pivotal role in shaping Japanese girls’ culture, and its dynamic evolution mirrors the prevailing trends and aspirations of the era. For many, this genre peaked in the 1970s. But why?

Part 1

Part 2

Follow the Trend

Before we move on to the third movement of the '70s, let's take a quick look at an essential characteristic of shoujo manga: its sensitivity to trends.

The early '70s were a confusing time for the industry. There was extreme freedom in certain corners, with Yukari Ichijo, Machiko Satonaka, and other prominent artists drawing very adult-like drama in shoujo magazines for young girls. In contrast, there was also a lot of moralism. The fact manga wasn't taken very seriously meant magazines could get away with a lot since adults considered them terrible influences anyway. But, at the same time, since manga wasn't a respected medium, they were also prone to hysteria. Nothing illustrates this scenario better than the controversies surrounding "Harenchi Gakuen," the first full-length series by Go Nagai, who went on to become one of the most celebrated manga names in the '70s.

Shameless! The nudity and erotic jokes in Go Nagai''s "Harenchi Gakuen" were a hit with kids and teens, scandalized parents and teachers, and made the shoujo industry chase after their own erotic hits.

Nagai, already a respected yet fledgling name in the industry, was recruited by Shueisha to be part of Shonen Jump's inaugural team in the late '60s. Jump, as any manga fan knows, is by far the biggest success story in manga editorial history. However, back then, it was just a newcomer in a field dominated by Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine and Shogakukan's Shonen Sunday. Go Nagai's series, whose translated name meant "Shameless High School," is Jump's first big hit and one of the titles that propelled the magazine to sell over 1 million copies.

But "Harenchi Gakuen," a gag manga with erotic jokes, scandalized adults across the nation. The Japanese Parents and Teachers Association successfully led a Shonen Jump boycott, getting the magazine banned in several shops across the country and triggering a media circus. At the time, agitated journalists often accosted Go Nagai at airports and public events, aggressively pointing their mics at him, a consequence of manga-kas celebrity-like notoriety during that era.

Meanwhile, the reaction around "Harenchi Gakuen" did not intimidate other manga magazines. In fact, all of them were pursuing their own "harenchi"-like phenomenon and publishing stories with erotic dirty jokes. And yes, that included the manga magazines for little girls. In Ribon, male manga-ka Hikaru Yuzuki was responsible for the "dirty" manga series. At Weekly Margaret, Yuzuki also had a considerable hit with the high school comedy "Elite Kyousoukyoku," which, while not precisely "ecchi," had a tone reminiscent of Nagai's work. At Nakayoshi, the artist in charge of this type of content was none other than a pre-"Candy Candy" Yumiko Igarashi.

Before finding success with the smash hit "Candy Candy" manga, Yumiko Igarashi was the Nakayoshi artist in charge of recreating the "harenchi" phenomenon in the pages of the magazine. Above, in a good display of how public manga artists were in the '70s, Yumiko describes her panties as part of a Nakayoshi feature.

The "harenchi" phenomenon hinted at a shoujo field that wasn't yet wholly solidified and, therefore, was taking cues straight from the shonen segment, which would later become uncommon. But it is also an example of how the genre projects readers' dreams and preferences.

An example of this is one of Ribon's most popular series during the '70s, Yukko Yamamoto's "Miki to Apple Pie," a gag high school manga full of absurd humor and nudity in the "Harenchi" vein. The twist is that it also had everything girls dreamed of.

The "apple pie" in the title was a reference to the lead character's favorite dessert during the time the American apple pie had just arrived in Japan and was considered the trendiest sweet. Miki Miyazawa, a popular and beautiful girl who served as the proxy for readers and was loosely modeled after talento Aki Aizawa, also loved astrology and the horoscope, and the romantic lead was a transfer student named Hideki Nanjo, who was a carbon copy of Hideki Saijo, the biggest popstar heartthrob of the '70s. Basically, "Miki to Apple Pie"'s central premise was "What if the popstars girls go crazy for was your silly gorgeous classmate?".

In fact, a testament to Saijo's popularity was how many shoujo manga romantic partners of the era used him as a model. Besides "Miki to Apple Pie," inserts of him were present in Satonaka Machiko's "Spotlight," Shigeko Maehara's "Kimi Iro no Hibi," Mayumi Yoshida's "Lemon Hakusho," among others.

With nudity, slapstick humor, and a lot of reference to trends and pop culture, "Miki to Apple Pie" was a massive hit on the pages of '70s Ribon. The romantic lead, Hideki Nanjo, inspired by heartthrob Hideki Saiji, would often do impromptu performances of the pop hits of the times from famous stars like Agnes Chan, Finger Five and, of course, Hideki Saiji himself.

Saijo is a relic of the past, but shoujo echoing the trends of its time is a timeless characteristic of the genre. That's why most shoujo artists are women who are close in age to their readers: this sensibility to girls' desires is a vital component of the market. From the way the characters look to how they dress to even the shape of their eyebrows, everything is supposed to reflect its time. Therefore, to successfully create shoujo, one has to understand how girls perceive themselves and also how they want to be perceived. How they dress and look, but also how and what they dream of looking and wearing. What they aspire to and, above all, what they find attractive in the opposite sex.

It was precisely that sensitivity and this unique sense of what girls want and dream of that led to the creation of what is now the number 1 shoujo manga trope: the high school romance starring an unassuming, ordinary heroine. Leading the way was another group of artists that, while not as internationally celebrated as the Year 24 Group, are definitely equally as crucial to shoujo history.

The Otometique Fervor

An "otometique" girl by Mutsu A-ko and some of the artist's popular furoku.

Yoshiko Nishitani, another of Shueisha's top shoujo artists of that era, is often credited as being the first to create a series around ordinary high school love. She did that in 1965's "Marie Lou," published in Weekly Margaret. "Marie Lou" was set in an American high school and had a very fashionable white girl as its lead. On her next manga, "Lemon to Sakuranbo" (Lemon and Cherries), she'd once again achieve immense success by bringing the teen romance closer to reality, using an ordinary Japanese high school as a backdrop.

While Nishitani pioneered this narrative style, the rise of more realistic, everyday stories gained momentum about a decade later. One catalyst for this was the "Otometique boom," a phenomenon that unfolded in the pages of Shueisha's Ribon magazine in the latter half of the '70s.

The term "Otometique" combines "otome," meaning "maiden" or a pure young girl, with the "-tique" (tikku in Japanese) suffix. A-ko Mutsu was the artist who spearheaded this movement.

A-ko made her debut in Ribon in 1971 at the age of 18. Her popularity skyrocketed four years later when her first short stories, led by "Tasogaredoki ni mitsuketa no" (What I Found at Twilight), were compiled into a tankobon that became a best-seller. This success elevated her status in Ribon, and soon her "otometique" style became the talk of the town.

Mutsu A-ko's art.

In contrast to the dramatic narratives of the "Satonaka-domain" faction, "otometique" stories adopted a more straightforward structure devoid of major plot twists and intense drama. Instead, they focused on modest love stories where the exhilarating moments were ordinary occurrences, like spotting a cute boy on the street or touching a crush's hand for the first time. While some stories included sad or supernatural elements, readers were captivated by the uncomplicated, heartwarming moments.

Ako's heroines were ordinary, unassuming schoolgirls, often characterized by shyness and insecurity. Different from extraordinary characters like Lady Oscar from "BeruBara" or the iconic Madame Butterfly tennis star in "Ace wo Nerae," Ako's protagonists were life-sized.

"Otometique" manga often incorporated romantic comedy tropes, such as chance encounters with cute guys on the way to school or the transformation into beauty after removing glasses. The happy endings typically featured a boy reciprocating the girl's love by accepting her as perfect and beautiful just as she was.

In otometique manga, girls were often in cute plaid and gingham check dresses and skirts, while boys were impeccably dressed in Ivy style, as seen in Mutsu Ako's art above.

While the stories may have seemed mundane, their distinctiveness lay in the meticulous attention to detail. As significant as the exploration of falling in love and discovering inner strength were all the visual details in "otometique" art. Girls had braids or long wavy hair and wore adorable clothes with plaids and gingham-check, as well as cute accessories. At a time when most Japanese girls still had Japanese-style rooms, "otometique" heroines had gorgeous Western-style rooms. They hung out in cozy cafes, made handmade goods, and ate tasty-looking sweets. Houses had French windows and balconies. Boys were tall, lean, with fluffy hair, and were always dressed impeccably in Ivy-style clothes. The "otometique" artists created an atmosphere that perfectly matched girls' aspirations at the time.

Girls often dreamed with having Western-style bedrooms like the ones in Otometique manga.

While Mutsu A-ko was the trailblazer, she was soon joined at the top by two other iconic artists, Yumiko Tabuchi, and Hideko Tachikake. Each of them had their quirks. Tabuchi, for example, often had college girls as her heroines, mirroring herself as a student at the elite, trendy Waseda University. While Tabuchi and A-ko preferred short stories, Tachikake had a penchant for longer series with a bit more drama. But they all had a similar aesthetic and relied on ordinary stories about love.

The "otometique" phenomenon reflected the trends of the time and foreshadowed the emerging consumer culture that would swallow the country in the next decade. The sophisticated visuals attracted people of all ages, from elementary school-aged girls to highly educated women and men. Both the top public and private universities in Japan, Tokyo University and Waseda, respectively, had famous "otometique" clubs full of students who loved the genre and the style. The mangas were so trendy they were often referred to as "Ivy mangas," in reference to the iconic Ivy style that was the catalyst of Japan's youth fashion which was going through a second revival around that time.

While projecting an atmosphere that girls dreamed of, "otometique" also showcases '70s youth and girls' culture. Melancholic, simple love stories among young people were also the theme of the big folk hits of the time. Ivy or country fashion and long hair for men were the trends. Western-inspired ideals- in decoration, fashion, and musical taste- were pervasive. And creating subcultures and hobbies around consumption was the path society was taking. Simple life-sized stories as a narrative preference echoed the reality of Japan, which was stabilizing itself after decades of turbulence. These stories brought what the country was craving: comfort.

Above, a Mutsu A-ko's bedroom that lived in girls' imagination. Below, the room is recreated in a 2021 exhibition of Ako's art.

Meanwhile, the rise of consumer culture among young girls led to a "fancy goods" boom, with stores selling cute stationery, stickers, and small items popping up everywhere around the country. Illustrators and companies, eager to capitalize, spared no time in creating appealing mascots and drawings to adorn these goods, and it was in that period that Sanrio created Hello Kitty.

Ribon and Nakayoshi, which were "furoku" magazines, also benefitted. Furoku are extra gifts that come with the purchase of the magazines. And the "otometique" boom meant Ribon could include "fancy goods" -- like notebooks, stickers, letter sets, and small paper goods readers could assemble -- with the illustration of these highly sought-after artists. Most girls around Japan could only dream of Western-style rooms, a closet full of cute Ivy fashion, trips to trendy cafes, and homes with French windows. But they could recreate a bit of this sophisticated atmosphere by having letter sets, notebooks, stickers, and small accessories with A-ko Mutsu, Hideko Tachikake, and Yumiko Tabuchi's art. These popular furokus and the "otometique" stories were critical for Ribon magazine to surpass 1 million copies in circulation.

Girls admired A-ko, Tabuchi, and Tachikake not only as artists creating heartfelt stories with attractive atmospheres but as personalities. The trio, who were in their late teens and early 20s, closely resonated with their fans due to their proximity in age and shared interests. The readers were moved when Ribon featured an article in which A-ko Mutsu had the opportunity to meet and interview her favorite singer, the rock star Kenji Sawada, a prominent teen idol of that era. The positive response was so overwhelming that, a few issues later, Hideko Tachikake, an avid folk music enthusiast, also had the chance to interview her idol, Kosetsu Minami, the lead singer of Kaguyahime.

An otometique girl by Yumiko Tabuchi (left) and a collection of furoku illustrated by her as seen on a 2021 exhibition on her art.

The popularity of "otometique" peaked in 1977. By 1981, the boom had almost faded, and Ako, Tabuchi, and Tachikake published their last work on Ribon in 1985. Tabuchi and Tachikake married and semi-retired, while Ako successfully transitioned to manga for adult women.

Despite the end of the style, "otometique" permeated every corner of Japanese society. Its furoku and atmosphere were one of the bases for the almighty "kawaii" culture which now rules the country. The life-sized heroines and focus on mundane love stories and everyday emotions went on to become one of the main characteristics of the shoujo manga industry.

The Iwadate Domain

For years, the influence of "otometique" has been downplayed, one of the reasons why the movement is almost undiscussed in the West. However, in the last few years, best-selling books reminiscing the style were published, and exhibitions of A-ko Mutsu and Yumiko Tabuchi's works were big hits across Japan. Ako, who moved back from Tokyo to her hometown in Fukuoka and never stopped working on manga, was recognized by the local prefecture as an honorary citizen and gained a permanent museum in the area, signaling her importance to the industry.

But while the "otometique" phenomenon happened on the pages of Ribon magazine, Mutsu, Tabuchi, and Tachikake weren't the only three attracting a massive audience to this type of real-life love story.

Mariko Iwadate's work was extremely popular from the late '70s to the mid-2000s. Above, a collection of her work from her Margaret era.

Going back to the research of sociologist Shinji Miyadai, three domains divided '70s shoujo. There was the "Moto Hagio domain," which included the Year 24 artists. The Hagio domain was more highbrow and intellectually challenging, and many considered it an equivalent to literature, attracting the intellectual elite that sniffed at manga in general. It is by far the most discussed and debated '70s shoujo movement, as well as the most famous in the West, but it was the least commercially successful at the time. Then there was the "Machiko Satonaka domain," with emotionally driven stories full of drama, plot twists, and larger-than-life heroines. Most of the '70s best-selling shoujo series fall under this category, which includes the work of Yukari Ichijo and Ryoko Ikeda and sports manga like "Ace wo Nerae," among others.

Finally, there's the domain in which the "otometique" stories were created. And Miyadai doesn't name it after any of the Ribon artists, calling it the "Mariko Iwadate domain" instead.

In the Satonaka domain, the heroine served as a proxy for the reader in a fantastical world, while in the Iwadate domain, the heroine represented the reader in the real world. But who is the influential Iwadate?

Mariko Iwadate, who made her debut in 1973 at the age of 16, rose to prominence by embracing the "otometique" style during its peak in the late '70s. Similar to Ribon artists, Iwadate captivated readers with her elegant and stylish art, featuring cute clothes, accessories, and intricate details.

Miyadai's choice to name the category after Iwadate rather than the genre pioneer Ako Mutsu may be attributed to Iwadate's sustained success. After leaving Ribon in 1985, Ako remained prolific but couldn't replicate her peak, while Iwadate continued her success even after she transitioned to adult women's manga. Iwadate's work, recognized for its emotional depth, became a significant inspiration for trailblazers like best-selling novelist Banana Yoshimoto and avant-garde manga artist Kyoko Okazaki. In 1993, when Miyadai wrote his book, Iwadate's fame and respect probably made her a more recognizable figure for readers to associate with the category.

Iwadate's soft girly art and story-telling made her extremely popular and influential.

Mariko Iwadate's narrative, especially her post-80s work, has a more psychological and mature element to it when compared to Ribon's artists. She, as an artist, bridged the gap between "otometique" and another highly influential "Iwadate domain" artist, Fusako Kuramochi.

Fusako Kuramochi, debuting while still a teen in the early '70s at Bessatsu Margaret, initially emulated her favorite artists, Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya, before finding her style—a realistic portrayal of romance with a substantial psychological element. Her success contributed to shaping Betsuma, alongside Ribon, as arguably the most influential and commercially thriving shoujo title -- the go-to magazine for high school romcom.

Like the otometique artists, Fusako Kuramochi first gained prominence with short stories and one-shots. In 1979, she wrote her first series, "Oshiaberi Kaidan," in which each chapter depicted the life of a young girl from junior high to her graduation day. In 1980, she published "Itsumo poketto ni Chopin," a classical music manga that was also about growth. From then on, she'd publish about two hit series every year in Betsuma before graduating successfully to adult women's manga in 1994.

Kuramochi's success was due to her great skill in portraying girls going through crushes, heartbreaks, and jealousy. The psychological elements struck a chord with readers and helped her create male romantic leads that were extremely popular.

Another component of Kuramochi's work was her sophistication, a result of her upbringing. Her father was the chairman of one of Japan's biggest printing companies, and she was raised in Shibuya, in the center of Tokyo, while attending an exclusive all-female institution. The fact she spent her youth in the middle of Tokyo's hustle and bustle meant she knew the capital well, and her works were full of references to trendy cafes, restaurants, nightspots, and neighborhoods. Her Betsuma work was published right before, and during Japan's luxurious Bubble years, so many chasing an exciting city life referred to her mangas.

While her Betsuma work reflected the reality and aspirations of the Bubble years, Kuramochi's true gift lay in providing readers with a realistic depiction of growing up and falling in love, making her stories immensely popular. In general, consumerism -- displayed through clothes, accessories, and decor -- isn't as crucial to her success as the three Ribon "otometique" artists.

While Fusako Kuramochi is part of the "Iwadate domain," you can argue that Kuramochi evolved into her own category, which was vital for the development of real-life love stories in shoujo in the '80s and '90s and the rise of other highly-influential artists like Ryo Ikuemi.

But going back to the three '70s movements, "otometique"/"Iwadate domain" was definitely the most influential one in steering shoujo manga in its current direction. On the other hand, all of these domains co-existed together and fed from each other. In 1977, during the "otometique" boom, Yukari Ichijo remained untouched as one of Ribon's most popular artists with her emotionally charged dramas. It was the success of Ichijo and other "Satonaka domain" artists that allowed the "Hagio domain" to debut and take risks. In turn, it was the "Hagio domain" that showed there were rewards for young risk-taking shoujo artists.

Yumiko Oshima, known for her girly art and sensitive story-telling, is the inspiration behind the otometique boom.

When asked which artist inspired them the most, both Ako Mutsu and Mariko Iwadate gave the same answer: Yumiko Oshima. Oshima, known for her quirky love stories and girly art, is an artist who trained alongside Hagio and Takemiya at the Oizumi salon and rose as part of the "Year 24 group," publishing risk-taking manga in Shogakukan and Hakusensha's magazine after a brief stint in Weekly Margaret. In other words, despite the striking differences, the origin of the "Iwadate domain" is the "Hagio domain."

While the influence of the idealized real-life romance is the one we can better observe today, contemporary shoujo would not exist if not for all these three styles meshing together and creating something new. And from that, things kept evolving and changing and gaining new forms. Because, once again, manga, and especially shoujo manga, is about reflecting the ideals of its time.

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ingek73 · 4 months

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The Observer view on Prince Harry’s court victory over Mirror Group Newspapers

Observer editorial

In his continuing campaign to bring the press to account for phone hacking, the Duke of Sussex may succeed where Leveson’s inquiry failed

Sun 17 Dec 2023 06.30 GMT

A smiling Prince Harry outside the Royal Courts of Justice, with photographers in the background.

In its defence of the civil court action brought by Prince Harry, Mirror Group Newspapers argued to the death that there was not a shred of evidence to support the Duke of Sussex’s claims of a lifetime of illegal information gathering and phone hacking. “Zilch, zero, nil, de nada, niente, nothing,” Andrew Green KC, the newspapers’ barrister, insisted in summing up. Piers Morgan, Mirror editor for much of the period in question, reiterated that denial – and took the opportunity to double down on his vindictive and blatantly self-serving assault on Harry’s reputation – in a prepared statement for the press on his doorstep on Friday. The damning 386-page judgment of Mr Justice Fancourt, published earlier that morning, tells a very different story, however.

In supporting Harry’s claims, and awarding him £140,600 in damages, it provides an exhaustive catalogue of evidence that “extensive and habitual” unlawful practices went on over a longer period at the Mirror than previously established; that the use of off-the-books private investigators and blaggers and hackers to capture personal details of Harry and his circle – and scores of other high-profile targets – was endemic at the Mirror’s three national titles from 1998 to 2011.

One dangerous consequence of these latest revelations has been renewed calls for legislative oversight of press freedom

The judgment also makes plain that the Mirror Group’s deletion of phone records and email evidence from the period, and the decision not to call senior editorial staff, including Morgan, to give evidence, must be understood as part of an ongoing culture of cover-up. What went on, the judge told the court, “was concealed from the board, from parliament in 2007 and 2011, from the Leveson inquiry, from shareholders and from the public for years”. Public trust in news, already serially undermined by political and commercial attacks, is again the victim of that denialism. One dangerous consequence of these latest revelations has been renewed calls for legislative oversight of press freedom, which a democracy must always resist.

Despite its denials, Mirror Group has paid out £100m to other litigants in out-of-court settlements. A further raft of cases will now no doubt follow. A previous test case brought by the Coronation Street actress Shobna Gulati established that, even in the absence of a full paper trail, it was clear the illegal practices were “generic” in the papers’ newsrooms from 2001 to 2006. In Mr Justice Fancourt’s assessment, the “generic” period could now extend between 1998 and 2011 – beyond both the arrest and conviction of the News of the World journalist Clive Goodman for similar practices in 2006, and – shockingly – Lord Leveson’s subsequent inquiry into the press.

When Harry first announced, five years ago, that he would make it his “life’s work” to seek justice for his family’s treatment by the tabloids, it was characterised – invariably in those same papers – as a fool’s errand. What his mission might now prove to be, however, is a half-workable replacement for the planned second phase of the Leveson inquiry, which was shamefully abandoned by Matt Hancock as culture secretary in 2018. That phase was due to examine the full extent of unlawful practice across the British press, the ways in which journalistic privileges designed, in all our interests, to hold the powerful and criminal to account in extremis, had been cynically “hijacked” to trade, at an industrial scale, in royal gossip and celebrity private lives.

Harry and others will bring further cases against Associated Newspapers’ Daily Mail and Rupert Murdoch’s Sun. It is to be hoped that the disclosure and defence of those actions may serve finally to establish the exact extent and limits of a culture that has been profoundly damaging to journalistic integrity and to British public life. In their notably scant reports of the judgment – a rare royal story in which they apparently have very little curiosity – neither paper referenced those forthcoming actions. No doubt, however, until the full truth is told, lawyers for both groups will continue to be exercised by little else.

#prince harry #the guardian

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feckcops · 7 months

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Ending apartheid is the only path to peace

“Things couldn’t stay as they were — and so, they didn’t. After almost a year of escalation, which was largely ignored by the international media despite near-daily death tolls, Israel and the Palestinian territories have erupted into a brutal and devastating war ...

“After many years of attempting to achieve statehood through non-violent legal and political means, the mainstream Palestinian movement has reached the end of a road. The world is now seeing the consequences of that reality. As Israeli newspaper Haaretz wrote in its editorial: ‘The prime minister … failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession … while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the rights and existence of Palestinians.’ That is a charitable perspective. Benjamin Netanyahu and his government must have been aware that this was one of the likely outcomes of their policies.

“As a result of those policies, between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea today, there is only one state. It governs two peoples who live by different rules: Jews, who enjoy the highest standards of human, civil and economic rights, even when these conflict with international law; and Palestinians, who cannot claim equal citizenship in any part of their historic homeland and instead live under varying degrees of oppression.

“In Gaza, this has meant a sixteen-year blockade which controls almost every aspect of what enters and leaves the territory — resulting in regular shortages of essentials from electricity to water to medicine, food and building materials. Two million people live in the Strip, almost half are children, more than half live in poverty and they have now been subjected to six wars since the blockade began.

“In the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Palestinians are divided into 224 ghettos, denied the rights to travel or associate freely by hundreds of roadblocks and military checkpoints, subject to arbitrary and prolonged detention (1,260 are currently interned without charge or trial), forcibly evicted on a regular basis, and killed, in the first half of 2023, at a rate of almost one per day. Then in Israel itself, they are also second-class citizens: denied the right to occupy as much as 80 percent of the land in a country that, since 2018, has been enshrined exclusively as a ‘nation state of the Jewish people.’

“The world’s leading human rights organisations, from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch, describe this as apartheid. So, too, does the South African movement which lived under and fought that system. The Palestinians have a right to resist apartheid. Those who are appalled by violence must contend with the indisputable fact that every legal and political route to such resistance has been systematically closed off by the Israeli government ...

“In the coming days, Israel will accelerate efforts to erase Palestine by flattening large parts of Gaza. It will do so with one of the most powerful militaries the world has ever seen. It will do so as a policy, with its Defence Minister describing Palestinians as ‘human animals’ and army spokespeople saying, ‘our focus is on (creating) damage, not on precision.’ And it will do so with the complicity of the West, whose governments fly its flags on their official buildings.

“It will do this in the name of ‘eliminating Hamas.’ But Hamas, whose atrocities deserve bitter condemnation, is a product of alienation, desperation and dispossession. The movement is seen by millions of Palestinians as part of a resistance to exactly the kind of indiscriminate destruction Israel is now unleashing upon a defenceless population. If Israel truly wanted to ‘wipe Hamas off the face of the earth,’ as its Defence Minister says, it would deal with the conditions that created them. But of course, it has no intention of doing that.

“When you restore context to the situation in Palestine, it becomes clear that the only path to peace is the end of the apartheid system. And yet, anyone who makes that case can expect to be roundly demonised in the coming days and weeks. The established consensus is that the ‘normality’ which prevailed until just a few days ago must be restored — even if it is abundantly clear that such normality has led us precisely to today’s disaster.”

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