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By Elliot D. Cohen $17.14
Chris Hedges $20.00
$35
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 AP / APTN Pool
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Just hours after their initial accusation, Swedish authorities announced that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is no longer suspected of rape in a case that reeks of a smear campaign against the website that released damning evidence against U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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A Palestinian man was convicted by a Jerusalem court of “rape by deception” after a Jewish woman he had consensual sex with grew enraged after discovering he had lied to her when he claimed to be Jewish.
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By Amy Goodman — July 12 marked the six-month anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti that killed as many as 300,000 people and left much of the country in ruins.
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By Eugene Robinson — For Roman Polanski, the long, unspeakable nightmare of being confined to his three-story chalet in Gstaad, the luxury resort in the Swiss Alps, is finally over.
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 AP / Roberto Pfeil
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Roman Polanski is a lucky man—and as of Monday, he’s also a free man after a Swiss judge decided that the justification for Polanski’s extradition to the U.S. was flawed. So, the “freedom-restricting measures against him have been revoked.” Updated
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 thewrap.com
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Claiming that Roman Polanski’s legal team is wrongly spinning the story of his sexual abuse of a minor over three decades ago “as an isolated incident,” British actress Charlotte Lewis piped up on Friday to declare that the director had “forced himself” upon her when she was 16 years old.
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 Flickr / sghmom56
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Former New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor was arrested Thursday morning and later in the day was facing charges of third-degree rape after a 15-year-old girl who allegedly met with Taylor in a Montebello, N.Y., hotel was treated for injuries at a hospital.
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 Flickr / renfield
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Even in cases of sexual abuse or rape, a strict abortion law enacted Tuesday in Oklahoma requires women to undergo a sonogram, during which the doctor has to turn the screen to face the patient and give her fetal development details.
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 AP / Gene J. Puskar
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By Mark Heisler — If the conduct of sports stars represents “values,” there never were any. In any case, it’s better to raise your kids yourself.
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Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
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Whether strung together to inform or shock or possibly both, this Vice TV take on Liberia’s civil war is just horrifying—and fascinating. Warning: graphic content.
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The health care reform bill that made it through the House of Representatives last month didn’t exactly win rave reviews from the pro-choice camp, and now it’s the Senate’s turn to have it out over whether government-subsidized health care should ever include coverage for abortions and, if so, under what circumstances that should be allowed.
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 AP / Roberto Pfeil
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Will Roman Polanski spend the holidays at his mountain chalet in Gstaad? That could well be the case after Polanski’s latest bail offer, this time to the tune of $4.5 million, was accepted by a Swiss court Wednesday, although the 76-year-old director ... (continued)
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 thisislondon.co.uk
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The British Defense Ministry is investigating 33 cases of alleged abuse of Iraqi civilians by its soldiers. Many of the allegations, which include sexual attacks and torture, reflect U.S. soldiers’ acts depicted in photos from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
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 AP / Musadeq Sadeq
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By Chris Hedges — The warlords we champion in Afghanistan are as venal, as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban.
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 U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Cohen A. Young
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Penny Coleman, AlterNet —
It can be shown that the patterns of military sex crimes are old and widespread—for generations, military service has transformed large numbers of American boys into sexual predators. So it seems reasonable to ask whether perhaps there is something about military culture or training or experience that can be identified as causative, and then, perhaps, changed.
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If ever there were magic words guaranteed to provoke instant fury in America’s far-right ranks (besides “Nobel Peace Prize”), they might sound a little like “Al Franken.” The comedian-turned-senator’s recent proposal—related to the rights of rape victims who are employees of government contractors—met with some baffling resistance from Republicans in Congress.
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By Eugene Robinson — Could it be that the conservative culture warriors who portray Hollywood as a cesspool of moral bankruptcy have been right all along? Not really. But in the case of Roman Polanski, the Puritan scolds definitely have a point.
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 news.bbc.co.uk
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A human rights organization reported 157 dead after Guinean troops fired on protesters Tuesday. Widespread rape has also been reported by witnesses. The country’s opposition leader was quoted by the BBC as saying, “I don’t know whether I’m on earth or in hell.”
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By Eugene Robinson — Hasn’t Roman Polanski suffered enough? Didn’t he endure all those cool, gray, rainy Paris winters? Didn’t he also drug and rape a 13-year-old girl?
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 AP Photo/Roberto Pfeil
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Director Roman Polanski’s 1977 sex crime case has become an international and intergenerational saga, now that members of at least four governments have become involved, the former minor in question has grown up and requested that the issue be put to rest, and the original judge has been dead since 1993. However, after Polanski’s arrest last Saturday in Zurich, it’s clear this drama is far from over. Updated
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 blogspot.com
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Remember all that malarkey about how the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan would result in a remarkable push for women’s rights? Well, the Afghan government has passed a law that allows Shiite men to deny food to their wives if they refuse their husbands’ sexual demands. Oh, and a rapist can effectively avoid prosecution by paying “blood money” to his victim.
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 AP / Roberto Schmidt, pool
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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton witnessed the horrific living conditions that many Congolese women and children are enduring in their embattled country on Tuesday and was attentive to their stories about rape and sexual violence. She announced during her visit that the U.S. is extending $17 million in aid targeting sexual brutality.
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 Flickr / Infomatique
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Although the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse found some 2,000 people who described the abuse they suffered at the hands of Catholic church officials in Ireland, resulting in a five-volume study (download the PDF version here), the alleged perpetrators have been shielded from prosecution, thanks to a successful lawsuit that protects their identities.
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 dodimagery.afis.osd.mil
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Women at war all too often do battle on two different fronts, as author Helen Benedict says in her new book, “The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq.” There’s the fight they signed up for and the one that can make them targets of their fellow soldiers in the most isolating and devastating ways.
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A group of determined Afghan women took to the streets of Kabul on Wednesday, suffering chants of “Dogs!” from a much larger crowd in order to challenge a law that essentially legalizes marital rape. The AP reports on a scene that underscores the complexities of that country—there were more women among the angry counterprotesters than in the women’s rights group.
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By Ellen Goodman — Ever since the Afghan war began, we assured ourselves that whatever else, we had one moral victory. We’d freed the women from Taliban rule. Now we know something very different to be true.
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 abcnews.com
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A CIA sex scandal, or, more precisely, allegations that a CIA agent raped two Algerian women, has raised questions in Congress about how the agency polices itself. Oddly, discussions of the controversy have failed to emphasize another significant “oops” moment in CIA operations regarding corruption and the need for oversight: torture.
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 U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Cohen A. Young
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“Military women are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq,” said Rep. Jane Harman in response to the news that the number of sexual assault reports in the military last year increased by about 9 percent to 2,923. The Pentagon believes the actual number of assaults is five to 10 times higher, because most go unreported.
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 breakfornews.com
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The International Criminal Court is getting its teeth, as judges have ordered the arrest of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity—including murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape—marking the first time the ICC has issued a warrant for a sitting head of state.
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By Ellen Goodman — It was a moment bound to give anyone second thoughts about Hillary Clinton’s nomination as secretary of state: Rush Limbaugh called it a “brilliant stroke.”
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 marinecorpstimes.com
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By Col. Ann Wright — There was quite a struggle in Congress this week [July 27-Aug. 2]. The Department of Defense refused to allow the senior civilian in charge of its Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office to testify in Thursday’s hearing on sexual assault in the military. Above, Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, who reported being raped in 2007 and whose body was found buried in a backyard in 2008.
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President Bush signed off Monday on the execution of Army Pvt. Ronald Gray, who has been on the U.S. military’s death row since 1988 for rape and murder convictions. Gray’s legal team is expected to appeal, and no date is set for his execution.
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The evidence collected from rape victims after they’ve been assaulted goes into something called a rape kit. It’s the product of a lengthy and uncomfortable examination process that, according to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times, far too often leads to nothing. Some 400,000 rape kits are sitting in storage, untested, right now.
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 abcnews.com
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For some time, it looked like former Halliburton/KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones, who claims she was gang-raped by co-workers over two years ago in Baghdad’s Green Zone, would be forced by KBR into private arbitration proceedings (read: no public record, corporation often has upper hand).
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A grim picture is emerging from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints compound in West Texas, where 416 children have been removed to state custody and 139 women have left. Court documents allege widespread sexual abuse of teenage girls who were married at puberty to much older men by the polygamist sect.
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By Amy Goodman — It’s the deadliest conflict since World War II. More than 5 million people have died in the past decade, yet it goes virtually unnoticed and unreported in the United States.
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 britannica.com
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Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah marked the first day of Hajj by pardoning the so-called Qatif girl, who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison because she was traveling with a man when she was attacked and gang-raped. The Saudi justice minister said that, despite the pardon, the king was “convinced and sure that the verdicts were fair.”
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The Saudi Arabian justice ministry has defended the high court’s decision to lash and imprison a 19-year-old girl and her male friend, both of whom were gang-raped last year. The two are being punished for “illegal mingling” of the sexes and, unofficially, taking their story to the media. The leading Democratic candidates have all signaled their outrage, but the Bush administration has adopted a mind-your-own-business approach.
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 news.bbc.co.uk
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A Saudi woman has been sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail by an appeals court because she was riding in a car with a man when she was attacked and gang-raped by seven men. It is forbidden in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to be together. She was 19 at the time of the attack.
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By Ellen Goodman — Warren Jeffs, a polygamist prophet, is on trial for aiding in the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl he married off to her cousin. It’s a sad story featuring an abhorrent man, but something about the case just doesn’t feel right to Ellen Goodman.
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 vcorps.army.mil
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In addition to the inherent hardships and risks that come with serving in the military, many female soldiers are dealing with the potential trauma of sexual assault and rape, according to a PBS investigation for its “NOW” TV series.
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Director Brian DePalma says “Pictures are what will stop the war,” and he’s out to prove it. His new film “Redacted,” which focuses on the brutal rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the killing of her family, uses graphic images from the war that he says media outlets have been too timid to show.
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By Marie Cocco — The falsely accused Duke lacrosse players deserve their indignation, but so does Jerry Miller, who spent 24 years in jail for a rape he did not commit. It turns out there are many innocent men—too many of them African-American—who have done time they shouldn’t have, and there are probably many, many more.
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By Ellen Goodman — During World War II, the Japanese army enslaved and raped 100,000 to 200,000 young women. By denying this atrocity, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and others have brought shame back to Japan.
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Sgt. Paul Cortez has been sentenced to 100 years in prison for his role in the rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her and her family. Cortez testified that he and two other soldiers chose the family because it was an “easy target.” The gang rape, murder and mutilation of the girl (the soldiers burned her corpse) outraged Iraqis.
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 aljazeera.net
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After a Sunni mother of 11 told al-Jazeera she had been raped by Iraqi soldiers, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused her of fabricating the story to stir sectarian tensions. But four men, including an officer who allegedly recorded the crime on his mobile phone, were arrested and confessed to the crime. Update: An alleged victim in a similar rape case has come forward.
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A rape victim in Florida was thrown in jail for two days when police discovered a warrant accusing her of failing to pay restitution for a theft she committed as a juvenile. A jail worker, allegedly motivated by religious convictions, then refused to give her a crucial dose of the morning-after pill.
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