RedTracker

Nancy Pelosi the money juggernaut Politico

25 Famous Women on Childlessness NY Magazine

Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp’s relationship was far from ‘normal’ The Guardian

The Afghan Girls Who Live As Boys The Atlantic

India’s Caste Culture is a Rape Culture The Daily Beast

Baduan has woken up the world to this reality. India’s culture of caste is a culture of rape. Both for oppression and opportunism, caste-based sexual violence is meant to silence our communities. Each attempt to achieve equality— going to school, getting a job, or voting—brings greater risk of reprisal. Because at its heart, caste-based sexual violence is about creating a climate of terror so that Dalits will fear challenging this system. This reprisal violence though has now reached record numbers with a recent study by the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights reporting that over 67% of Dalit women have faced some form of sexual violence.

This culture of rape is also a culture of impunity where upper-caste Hindu perpetrators of these crimes are protected within India’s rape culture at all levels of the justice system. UN Special Rapporteur Ms. Rashida Manjoo relays in her recent report on the status of women in India that there is a “deeply entrenched patriarchal attitude of police officers, prosecutors, judicial officers.” This coupled with the unsavory reality that members of the police, judiciary, and public officials often collude with perpetrators to keep Dalit women from filing claims and receiving justice.

HopeTracker

The Way to Beat Poverty NY Times

One reason the United States has not made more progress against poverty is that our interventions come too late. If there’s one overarching lesson from the past few decades of research about how to break the cycles of poverty in the United States, it’s the power of parenting — and of intervening early, ideally in the first year or two of life or even before a child is born.

The article points out further:

— 60% of children born with fetal alcohol symdrome or effects become expelled from school. Nearly half have displayed inappropriate sexual behavior — public masturbation, for example.

— 20% of babies have mothers who smoked during pregnancy. An Emory University study found that when a mther smoked a pack of cigarettes a day during pregnancy, her children (especially boys) were more than twicee a likely to be violent criminals as adults.

Dr. Jack P. Shonkoff, founder of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, argues that the constant bath of cortisol (stress hormones) in a high-stress infancy predicts that a child will embrace a high-risk environment. The cortisol affects brain structures so that those individuals live a fight-or-flight existence as adults.

Dr. Shonkoff calls this “toxic stress” and describes it as one way that poverty regenerates itself in an ongoing cycle. Moms in poverty are more likely to live in high stress environments. Juggling enormous challenges, they are also more likely to be teenage mothers. “A baby in such an environment is more likely to grow up with a brain bathed in cortisol.” Read on at NT Times

Saint Laurent, Brurberry And Dior Deny Animal Cruelty Vogue.com

A fur coat on the Christian Dior catwalk for autumn/winter 2014

Last Chance for Animals is a non-profit animal rights organization that spent two years investigating 70 rabbit farms in Spain.

Timed to coincide with current spring 2015 designer shows, the group alleges that brands including Marc Jacobs, Diane von Furstenberg, Burberry, Christian Dior, Giorgio Armani, Yves Saint Laurent and Louis Vuitton used those farms despite evidence of animal cruelty.

Brands Burberry, Christian Dior and Saint Laurent “vehemently denied claims that they source rabbit fur from farms accused of animal cruelty.”

New York is the friendliest city for vegetarians, says animal rights group New York Daily News

Prople for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has deemed New York as the nation’s most vegan-friendly city.

“New York boasts more than 140 vegetarian restaurants, countless veggie-friendly establishments, and the first vegetarian public school,” said City Councilman Corey Johnson (D-Upper West Side)