From the Graniad, out of their correspondent in New York.
Campaigners against prostitution and sex trafficking appeared to have won a victory over the weekend when Craigslist, the powerful online advertising website, capitulated to mounting pressure and removed its "adult services" content from US servers.
The move is an important concession in the fierce debate in America between free speech and first amendment advocates and those seeking to clean up the web and protect vulnerable girls and women from exploitation. It follows a sustained campaign by prosecutors across the US to have the sex advertisements removed.
In the absence of comment from Craigslist, it is not clear whether the shift will be permanent. It is also unclear what the concession means for other countries, including the UK, where "erotic" services remained available today. However, the fact that the site's executives placed a "censored" block over its adult services link in the US suggests that, in word at least, they have not given up the fight.
The sex services portion of the website, previously called its "erotic" section, was criticised as a thinly veiled clearing house for prostitution. It exposed Craigslist to several damaging scandals, the most serious of which was the killing in April last year of Julissa Brisman, a 25-year-old masseuse from New York, in a Boston hotel. Philip Markoff, her alleged murderer, was dubbed the Craigslist killer because he had arranged to meet her through the site. He killed himself in jail last month.
Brandon Petty pleaded guilty last month to sexually attacking with a knife four women who had advertised for sex through Craigslist. He faces up to 45 years in prison.
Also last month, an advert was placed in the Washington Post and another paper under the headline "Dear Craig", in which two women said they had been forced into prostitution with punters attracted through the website. One of the women said she had been sold by the hour at lorry rest stops while the other said she had been a victim of sex trafficking from the age of 11.
Chief prosecutors from 17 states across the US clubbed together on 24 August to write a joint letter to the website complaining that "ads trafficking children are rampant on it". They accused the site of profiting from the "suffering of the women and children who continue to be victimised by Craigslist".
Though Craigslist has faced an intensifying public relations crisis, it is shielded from prosecution by a federal law that protects internet providers from the actions of their users.
According to web advertising monitors AIM group, Craigslist made $45m from its sex ads last year, about a third of its total profits. The website insists it has responded to concerns by introducing in the past year a system of weeding out the most egregious adverts, claiming to have rejected 700,000 items since May 2009.
"Craigslist is committed to being socially responsible, and when it comes to adult services ads, that includes aggressively combating violent crime and human rights violations," the chief executive, Jim Buckmaster, recently said on his blog.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Cute
I kind of agree.
Hayao Miyazaki is considered to be one of the greatest in his industry. This famed manga artist, film director, and animator has numerous classics under his belt, a list that includes Lupin III, Princess Mononoke, and the 1988 masterpiece, My Neighbor Totoro. If any of those things are a sign of his credibility, then you might want to listen to him when he says the iPad is "disgusting."
"For me, there is no feeling of admiration or no excitement whatsoever," Miyazaki said in an interview with Neppuu, a Studio Ghibli-published pamphlet. "It's disgusting. On trains, the number of those people doing that strange masturbation-like gesture is multiplying."
He compares this trend to how people had portable cassette players back in the day. He notes he got "fed up" when people in trains started reading manga, and later when they started using cellphones. He believes that the majority of these people use these products only as consumers, not as creators.
Miyazaki has revealed that he doesn't have his own computer, DVD player, and rarely watches any TV. He doesn't email enybody, he sends them letters the old-fashioned way. It's safe to say we can add the iPad to the list of things we'll never find in his house.
If there's anything you'd like to know about the iPad, like how to fondle it and how disgusting it could really be, check out our sister site, iPad.net.
Hayao Miyazaki is considered to be one of the greatest in his industry. This famed manga artist, film director, and animator has numerous classics under his belt, a list that includes Lupin III, Princess Mononoke, and the 1988 masterpiece, My Neighbor Totoro. If any of those things are a sign of his credibility, then you might want to listen to him when he says the iPad is "disgusting."
"For me, there is no feeling of admiration or no excitement whatsoever," Miyazaki said in an interview with Neppuu, a Studio Ghibli-published pamphlet. "It's disgusting. On trains, the number of those people doing that strange masturbation-like gesture is multiplying."
He compares this trend to how people had portable cassette players back in the day. He notes he got "fed up" when people in trains started reading manga, and later when they started using cellphones. He believes that the majority of these people use these products only as consumers, not as creators.
Miyazaki has revealed that he doesn't have his own computer, DVD player, and rarely watches any TV. He doesn't email enybody, he sends them letters the old-fashioned way. It's safe to say we can add the iPad to the list of things we'll never find in his house.
If there's anything you'd like to know about the iPad, like how to fondle it and how disgusting it could really be, check out our sister site, iPad.net.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
This piece, excerpted from the Sunday Observer this week, was interesting. The British government is trying to take a pro-GMO approach. British media is delivering voluble objections.
Now that climate change appears to pose a greater risk, in the shape of absolute food shortages, reflexive opposition to GM crops could start to look, as Hilary Benn is hinting, like attitudinising. Already, he reduces the debate to a matter of safety: sorted. "The government's job is to ask if it is safe to eat and there is no evidence that it isn't," he told the Today programme.
"There is no evidence that it isn't"? As spectacular over-simplifications go, this is up there with the media's time-honoured reduction of the GM critique to Frankenprefixes and is, unfortunately, perfectly designed to rebut it. By focusing, to the exclusion of so much else, on the question of safety, the media have made it too easy for Mr Benn. He discovers no evidence of harm. But where would any intelligent person expect to find it?
While the investigation of safety, like every other aspect of GM, from research to patents to the sale of seeds to hard-up peasant farmers, is controlled by biotech multinationals, there will never be any trustworthy evidence one way or the other. The corporations are there to sell the world chemicals and seeds, not to look after it. Thus, the government's job is not, at the moment, to reconsider the safety of GM food. That can come later. Right now, it should explain how, in choosing to bring GM to Britain, it justifies placing this part of our national food policy under the control of a few fantastically aggressive and wholly unaccountable multinationals. Not that they can't be philanthropic. Monsanto recently gave a scholarly institution, the British Biochemical Society, a generous grant for educational materials, such as school websites.
...But the biggest question is for the government. Anyone can see why multinationals want control over our food production. But why on earth does Hilary Benn want to hand it over?
Now that climate change appears to pose a greater risk, in the shape of absolute food shortages, reflexive opposition to GM crops could start to look, as Hilary Benn is hinting, like attitudinising. Already, he reduces the debate to a matter of safety: sorted. "The government's job is to ask if it is safe to eat and there is no evidence that it isn't," he told the Today programme.
"There is no evidence that it isn't"? As spectacular over-simplifications go, this is up there with the media's time-honoured reduction of the GM critique to Frankenprefixes and is, unfortunately, perfectly designed to rebut it. By focusing, to the exclusion of so much else, on the question of safety, the media have made it too easy for Mr Benn. He discovers no evidence of harm. But where would any intelligent person expect to find it?
While the investigation of safety, like every other aspect of GM, from research to patents to the sale of seeds to hard-up peasant farmers, is controlled by biotech multinationals, there will never be any trustworthy evidence one way or the other. The corporations are there to sell the world chemicals and seeds, not to look after it. Thus, the government's job is not, at the moment, to reconsider the safety of GM food. That can come later. Right now, it should explain how, in choosing to bring GM to Britain, it justifies placing this part of our national food policy under the control of a few fantastically aggressive and wholly unaccountable multinationals. Not that they can't be philanthropic. Monsanto recently gave a scholarly institution, the British Biochemical Society, a generous grant for educational materials, such as school websites.
...But the biggest question is for the government. Anyone can see why multinationals want control over our food production. But why on earth does Hilary Benn want to hand it over?
Wild insect species are also threatened by genetically modified organisms, some with mutation, and others, like the monarch butterfly, with extinction, as is detailed in the book that I've linked to.
Protesters destroy genetically modified grapevines at French government research site
By The Associated Press (CP) – 6 days ago
PARIS — Protesters have destroyed vines of genetically modified grapes at a government research site in eastern France.
The security chief for the Haut-Rhin region, Jean-Christophe Bertrand, told Europe-1 radio that 50 people were detained after the incident Sunday morning.
The government ministers for the environment, agriculture and research condemned the "intentional destruction" at the National Institute for Agronomic Research in Colmar.
In a statement, the ministers said the research on the biotech vines poses no risk to health or the environment, and was meant in part to study a virus that damages grapevines.
French environmental activists have routinely destroyed fields of genetically modified crops.
Copyright © 2010 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
By The Associated Press (CP) – 6 days ago
PARIS — Protesters have destroyed vines of genetically modified grapes at a government research site in eastern France.
The security chief for the Haut-Rhin region, Jean-Christophe Bertrand, told Europe-1 radio that 50 people were detained after the incident Sunday morning.
The government ministers for the environment, agriculture and research condemned the "intentional destruction" at the National Institute for Agronomic Research in Colmar.
In a statement, the ministers said the research on the biotech vines poses no risk to health or the environment, and was meant in part to study a virus that damages grapevines.
French environmental activists have routinely destroyed fields of genetically modified crops.
Copyright © 2010 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
Here's a recent comment that I made on biofortified, in a debate entitled "Ethics of Labeling on genetically modified foods. I've changed one minor typo in the text below, but otherwise this is the text in its entirety. Follow the link above to see the whole discussion, although the comment below is as yet awaiting moderation:
I also really appreciated the discussion on this thread, especially Duncan's interesting comments. I'm not sure if you're all Americans, but certainly the fight to label is far from over, with much of the current impetus coming from Europe. Essentially every single country with regulation in the entire world, with the exception of Mexico, Costa Rica, and America, voted against dispensing with labeling at the United Nations Codex Alimentarius Food Safety meeting, and many elements are preparing to try to introduce mandatory labeling the next time the meeting happens. Even Prince Charles waded into the fray, saying that there should be labeling within Great Britain. I think, given how this discussion has evolved, that a getting back to the basics post might also be warranted.
So here are my basics:
a) genetically modified foods have recently contaminated wild species. This has proven to be true with a study coming out to that effect in the last month that has been presented to the Ecological Society of America vis-a-vis canola in the United States: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-08/esoa-sft072110.php
b) some of the plants that are being modified are being engineered to produce pesticides that have a long term effect that may be deleterious to human health, as we cannot possibly study all of this over the long term. Other interventions include having plants that are more resistant to pesticide, causing farmers to spray at a level never before tolerated by the plants themselves, making pesticide levels the highest for these crops in human history.
c) control of the global food supply is in the hands of a scant few multinational corporations, which will not allow farmers to save their own seed, and continually come out with supervariations to sell more. Farmers are thus impoverished into a spiralling cycle of perpetual debt. The recent persecution of American farmers for saving seed is evidence of this.
d) Because plants are being genetically engineered to produce pesticides, or to take higher level of pesticides, many bugs are becoming so resistant to the chemicals that "superbugs" are at risk of being created, upon whom traditional sprays no longer work, creating a dependence on genetically modified crops because heirloom vegetables may not be able to physically survive the depredations of these new predators. As well, the new crops may require new and higher levels of pesticides that may prove carcinogenous, but there might someday be no choice but to do this for the entire population, as these types of bugs don't always respect borders.
Just some things to get started with. Ideas, anyone?
Thanks for a really thought provoking and informative dialogue.
I also really appreciated the discussion on this thread, especially Duncan's interesting comments. I'm not sure if you're all Americans, but certainly the fight to label is far from over, with much of the current impetus coming from Europe. Essentially every single country with regulation in the entire world, with the exception of Mexico, Costa Rica, and America, voted against dispensing with labeling at the United Nations Codex Alimentarius Food Safety meeting, and many elements are preparing to try to introduce mandatory labeling the next time the meeting happens. Even Prince Charles waded into the fray, saying that there should be labeling within Great Britain. I think, given how this discussion has evolved, that a getting back to the basics post might also be warranted.
So here are my basics:
a) genetically modified foods have recently contaminated wild species. This has proven to be true with a study coming out to that effect in the last month that has been presented to the Ecological Society of America vis-a-vis canola in the United States: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-08/esoa-sft072110.php
b) some of the plants that are being modified are being engineered to produce pesticides that have a long term effect that may be deleterious to human health, as we cannot possibly study all of this over the long term. Other interventions include having plants that are more resistant to pesticide, causing farmers to spray at a level never before tolerated by the plants themselves, making pesticide levels the highest for these crops in human history.
c) control of the global food supply is in the hands of a scant few multinational corporations, which will not allow farmers to save their own seed, and continually come out with supervariations to sell more. Farmers are thus impoverished into a spiralling cycle of perpetual debt. The recent persecution of American farmers for saving seed is evidence of this.
d) Because plants are being genetically engineered to produce pesticides, or to take higher level of pesticides, many bugs are becoming so resistant to the chemicals that "superbugs" are at risk of being created, upon whom traditional sprays no longer work, creating a dependence on genetically modified crops because heirloom vegetables may not be able to physically survive the depredations of these new predators. As well, the new crops may require new and higher levels of pesticides that may prove carcinogenous, but there might someday be no choice but to do this for the entire population, as these types of bugs don't always respect borders.
Just some things to get started with. Ideas, anyone?
Thanks for a really thought provoking and informative dialogue.
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