Human Rights Watch releases a new report on Egypt’s unequal divorce law:

Men in Egypt have a unilateral and unconditional right to divorce. They never need to enter a courtroom to end their marriages. Women, on the other hand, must resort to the courts to divorce their spouses, where they confront countless social, legal and bureaucratic obstacles. Women who seek divorce in Egypt have two options: fault-based or no-fault divorce. In order to initiate a fault-based divorce, which can provide full financial rights, a woman must show evidence of harm inflicted by her spouse during the course of their marriage. Even physical abuse often needs to be supported by eyewitness testimony. Since 2000, Egyptian women have had the option of filing for no-fault divorce (khula). But to do so, they must agree to forfeit their financial rights and repay the dowry given to them by their husbands upon marriage. Adopted as a way to speed up the divorce process, no-fault divorce still requires women to petition the court to terminate their marriages.

Grow up:

There were also buttons expressing support for homosexuals in the military that were passed out for students to wear in the law school and while they interviewed with different employers. I know that several of the employers that I interviewed with wore the buttons as well. As a non-button wearing student I was asked several times a day if I wanted to wear one. It was like the Nazi button policies turned on their head. There was very little opportunity to express alternative opinions at the law school. I did not sign the petition nor did I wear the buttons that were passed out. I was asked several times a day if I would sign the petition or put on a button, and it got quite tiresome to repeatedly say no.

I’d like to say that it’s only at Yale that students being asked to sign petitions opposing the army’s open policy of discrimination against homosexual Americans argue that they’re the ones really being persecuted (as if by Nazis, no less). But it’s not only at Yale.

Jesse Jackson calls for every vote to be counted:

In Ohio, a court just ruled there can’t be a recount yet, because the vote is not yet counted. It’s three weeks after the election, and Ohio still hasn’t counted the votes and certified the election. Some 93,000 overvotes and undervotes are not counted; 155,000 provisional ballots are only now being counted. Absentee ballots cast in the two days prior to the election haven’t been counted. Ohio determines the election, but the state has not yet counted the vote. That outrage is made intolerable by the fact that the secretary of state in charge of this operation, Ken Blackwell, holds — like Katherine Harris of Florida’s fiasco in 2000 — a dual role: secretary of state with control over voting procedures and co-chair of George Bush’s Ohio campaign. Blackwell should recuse himself so that a thorough investigation, count and recount of Ohio’s vote can be made.

Blackwell reversed rules on provisional ballots in place in the spring primaries. These allowed voters to cast provisional ballots anywhere in their county, even if they were in the wrong precinct, reflecting the chief rationale for provisional ballots: to ensure that those who went to the wrong place by mistake could have their votes counted. The result of this decision — why does this not surprise? — was to disqualify disproportionately ballots cast in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County. Blackwell also permitted the use of electronic machines that provided no paper record. The maker of many of these machines, the head of Diebold Co., promised to deliver Ohio for Bush. In one precinct in Franklin County, an electric voting system gave Bush 3,893 extra votes out of a total of 638 votes cast. Blackwell also presided over a voting system that resulted in quick, short lines in the dominantly Republican suburbs, and four-hour and longer waiting lines in the inner cities. Wealthy precincts received ample numbers of voting machines and numerous voting places. Democratic precincts received inadequate numbers of machines in too few polling places that were often hard to locate; this caused daylong waits for the very working people who could least afford the time.

If only there were some way to see this coming:

The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion “tantamount to torture” on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The finding that the handling of prisoners detained and interrogated at Guantánamo amounted to torture came after a visit by a Red Cross inspection team that spent most of last June in Guantánamo. The team of humanitarian workers, which included experienced medical personnel, also asserted that some doctors and other medical workers at Guantánamo were participating in planning for interrogations, in what the report called “a flagrant violation of medical ethics.” Doctors and medical personnel conveyed information about prisoners’ mental health and vulnerabilities to interrogators, the report said, sometimes directly, but usually through a group called the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, or B.S.C.T. The team, known informally as Biscuit, is composed of psychologists and psychological workers who advise the interrogators, the report said. The United States government, which received the report in July, sharply rejected its charges, administration and military officials said.

A major victory for the freedom of Yale and schools across the nation from vindication of government-imposed discrimination:

The 2-to-1 decision in Philadelphia today, by the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, said the law violates the schools’ First Amendment rights in two ways. Citing a 2000 decision of the United States Supreme Court that said the Boy Scouts have a First Amendment right to exclude gay scoutmasters, the appeals court said the law schools have a First Amendment right to convey a message opposing discrimination against gays by excluding military recruiters. The appeals court also said that the presence of military recruiters on campus forces universities to convey a message with which they disagree. That is a form of compelled speech, the court said, prohibited by the First Amendment.

…The government can ask the full appeals court to review the three-judge panel’s decision or ask the Supreme Court to hear the case. In either case, the government may also ask for a stay of the decision. In the meantime, Mr. Rosenkranz said, colleges and universities are free to limit military recruiters’ access to their campuses. “Now every academic institution in the country is free to follow their consciences and their nondiscrimination policies,” Mr. Rosenkranz said. “Enlightened institutions have a First Amendment right to exclude bigots. In a free society, the government cannot co-opt private institutions to issue the government’s message.”

Tired of being told by the media that you’re not a values voters? Speak out about your moral values here.

Thomas Geoghegan (author of the brilliant Which Side Are You On: Trying To Be For Labor When It’s Flat On Its Back) calls for the Democrats to govern from the blue states:

John Kennedy and the old Democrats did not have to be so direct. Labor could decode them. Kennedy could say, “I’m for labor,” and people knew that by electing Kennedy, labor would turn that simple statement into cash. But now we have to be more explicit. We have to tell people in a simpler way: Here is how you get the dough. We can try a new, direct approach, to help us govern in the Blue States. So we can begin with three months’ paid maternity leave. Oh yes, be sure to
say: We will give assistance to small business. Then maybe, after a while, go to paid maternity leave of four months. Same with vacation. Let’s start with seven days. Then maybe go to ten. And what will the GOP say, No? Let them say no. Let the Heritage Foundation scream. We want the screaming so loud, it wakes up people in the pews. Let the Republicans go to the voters and say no. Let’s have a big, noisy battle in every one of the Blue States. I can hardly wait.

Over the years, the Democrats have become terrified to put anything in the platform, because the GOP will add up the numbers and say, “This will cost $10 trillion.” So, terrified, we put little in the platform. We think we’re being smart. We aren’t giving any targets. But it also means we have nothing to hand out. No maternity leave. No severance. No vacation. And that’s why, if we start governing from the Blue States, we ought to do it with a platform: “Here’s the minimum, here’s what we want, in every state.” The idea is, we want to make ourselves a target. We want people in the Red States to see what we are doing. And if we start governing in the Blue States in this way, we’ll begin to show people what they miss by living in the Red States: paid maternity leave, vacation time, family time. Just to promise a direct payoff of this kind is a whole new way of appealing to people’s economic interests. It is much, much more direct than anything the Democrats have ever tried. But it’s not enough just to make the promise in a speech, or even to put it in a platform. From now on, whenever possible, we have to put these payoffs on the ballot. Let’s plan, now, for 2006. In every Blue State, we should have each new benefit, separately, with a separate box, on the voter’s Blue State ballot. Paid maternity leave. Paid vacation. Paid sick leave. Real severance pay.

This one’s for you, Matt: Wired reports on Brazil’s radical rejection of the intellectual property dogma which has kept scores in the third world from accessing life-saving drugs:

In 1996, in response to Brazil’s alarming rate of AIDS infection, the government of then-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso guaranteed distribution of the new retroviral drug cocktails to all HIV carriers in the country. Five years later, with the AIDS rate dropping, it was clear that the plan was wise but – at the prices being charged for the patented drugs in the cocktail, utterly unsustainable. Brazil’s economy is the world’s 10th largest, but it is also the world’s most unequal, with 10 percent of the populationin control of almost half the wealth and more than 20 percent living in desperate poverty. Those are the sorts of figures that strain a government’s budget even when it’s not trying to stop the spread of AIDS. Such was the arithmetic that led José Serra – economist, politician, and the man who set Brazil on its path toward IP independence – to take an interest in the topic. “I always found intellectual property boring,” says Serra, appointed health minister under Cardoso in 1998. “Among economists, intellectual property isn’t considered one of the noble questions.” But with the drug patents standing between Serra and a functioning AIDS program, the problem took on a particular urgency.

His first approach was to go to the key patent holders, the US pharmaceutical giant Merck and the Swiss firm Roche, and ask for a volume discount. When the companies said no, Serra raised the stakes. Under Brazilian law, he informed them, he had the power in cases of national emergency to license local labs to produce patented drugs, royalty free, and he would use it if necessary. Merck immediately caved, but Roche stood its ground until August 2001, when Serra prepared to make good on his threat by drawing up the required paperwork. It was the first time a poor country had even come close to breaking a drug patent – and Roche, stunned, returned to the bargaining table with a newly cooperative attitude. In return for Serra’s agreement to play nice, the drugmaker would reduce the price of its drug in Brazil to less than half what it was (and less than Brazil’s cost to go it alone)…Already the outlines of an international open source alliance – a coalition of the penguin, if you will – have begun to emerge. India, for instance, is mustering a political commitment to free software that Stallman himself has declared second only to Brazil’s. And at the last UN World Summit on the Information Society, Brazil led a bloc including India, South Africa, and China that thwarted an attempt by the US and its allies to harden the UN’s line on intellectual property rights, insisting that the final conference document recognize just as strongly the cultural and economic importance of shared knowledge.

So much for checks and balances:

Rep. Hostettler, addressing a special legislative briefing of the Christian Coalition last month in Washington, reportedly talked at length about a bill he plans to introduce. It would deny federal courts the right to hear cases challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, which bans same-sex marriage. “Congress controls the federal judiciary,” Rep. Hostettler was quoted as saying. “If Congress wants to, it can refer all cases to the state courts. Congress can say the federal courts have limited power to enforce their decision.” Apparently, the Hoosier congressman has not heard of the balance of power among the three arms of our government. He was quoted as telling the Christian Coalition members: “When the courts make unconstitutional decisions, we should not enforce them. Federal courts have no army or navy… The court can opine, decide, talk about, sing, whatever it wants to do. We’re not saying they can’t do that. At the end of the day, we’re saying the court can’t enforce its opinions.” Another congressman, Alabama Republican Robert Aderholdt, was quoted as advocating court stripping as a means to protect state-sponsored Ten Commandment displays, such as the one erected by former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore.

Go here if you want to read something David Brooks hasn’t:

…rich country trade liberalization is generally a quid pro quo for concessions from developing countries. Many of these concessions, such as the enforcement of rich country patent and copyrights, impose substantial costs on developing countries. In addition, trade agreements often limit the ability of developing countries to pursue the same sort of industrial policies that rich countries used in order to develop. It is entirely possible that the cost to developing countries from paying copyright- and patent-protected prices to rich countries will equal or exceed the gains from rich country trade liberalization, as suggested by preliminary research on this topic by the World Bank10. If trade agreements simultaneously foreclose successful development paths for poor countries, then the world’s poor may end up being the big losers from commercial agreements that promise trade liberalization by rich countries.

Human Rights Watch on the UN’s slip on Sudan:

While today’s resolution recalls prior Security Council resolutions passed in July and September, it leaves out the explicit demand in those resolutions for Khartoum to disarm and prosecute the government-backed Janjaweed militias. In addition, the new resolution omits language in the Resolutions 1556 and 1564 that specifically threatened “further measures,” including the possibility of sanctions. Instead, it includes a much milder warning to “take appropriate action against any party failing to fulfill its commitments.” “We fear that the Sudanese government will take this resolution as a blank check to continue its atrocities against the civilian population in Darfur,” said Jemera Rone, Human Rights Watch’s senior Sudan researcher. Human Rights Watch called on the Security Council to monitor the situation closely and follow through on its prior commitments to end the massive human rights abuses in Darfur. “Don’t leave the people of Darfur unprotected,” said Rone.