Saturday, March 29, 2014


News Clips For The Day


Girls 'Treated as Cattle': Child Brides Divide Pakistan – NBC
By Wajahat S. Khan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- A proposed law seeking tough new penalties for marrying children has triggered intense debate in Pakistan.

At the moment, females can legally tie the knot at 16 while males must wait until they are 18. However, it is customary for younger teen girls to be married by their families in some parts of the country. Girls are also sometimes offered as compensation to end feuds between families.

Anyone involved in underage wedlock currently faces a $10 fine, possibly accompanied by up to a month in jail. But lawmaker Marvi Memon is fighting for this to be increased to $1,000 - which is about a month's wage for a recent graduate working at a bank -- and a possible jail sentence of two years.

"These girls are being treated as cattle," Memon told NBC News. "They are dying. We cannot have little girls being married off at 15 and 16 and being forced to produce kids. It doesn’t make sense medically, and it doesn’t make sense economically."
According to UNICEF's State of the World's Children Report 2014, seven percent of Pakistani girls are married under the age of 15.

“Our prime objective is to ensure that our women are productive members of society,” Memon added. “For that to happen the injustices that are meted out to these child brides have to be curbed.”

Her bill in the country's National Assembly has been met with fierce opposition from Pakistan’s conservative religious parties, including her own. And some clerics want the penalties scrapped altogether. Pakistan's government does not track the issue or keep statistics on child marriage and few cases are reported to police.

Memon's battle has been dubbed by some as "Marvi vs. Mullahs" and #mullahsvsmarvi trended briefly on Twitter, a rare religious debate on the country's social-media scene.

Arguing that even the current laws forbidding child marriage contradict the Koran, the influential chair of the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) has spoken out against the proposals.

Maulana Muhammad Khan Sherani believes that parliament could not legislate laws which are against the teachings of the Quran. He did not return repeated calls seeking comment from NBC News.

Gibran Peshimam, the political editor of Pakistan’s influential Express Tribune newspaper, highlighted that Sherani's advisory body wields considerable power.
“The CII’s edicts may not be legally binding, strictly speaking, but they have enough value to affect legislation," he said. “Basically, the CII is meant to interpret laws and legislation by done by parliament to ensure that the basic provision in Pakistan’s Constitution, that 'no law shall be made repugnant to the Quraan and Sunnah (the Muslim way of life),' is followed.'"

Under Islamic tradition, any person is free to marry after reaching puberty, according to Werner Menski, a professor of South Asian laws at SOAS, University of London.

After the Islamic contract of marriage has been agreed upon and a dowry paid, if the bride consents to marriage the argument has traditionally been that God has heard the offer. That makes it binding under Islamic law and sex would be permitted, Menski added.

"They are not physically and mentally ready"
Once married, young girls can become isolated and they are often forced into early sex, according to Ann Warner, a senior gender and youth specialist at the International Center for Research on Women.

“This leads to early pregnancy and very high risk pregnancy,” she said. “Younger girls are at a much higher risk of death and disability during pregnancy and their children are also at much higher risk of not surviving and dying as young children."
Warner said that early marriage "has an extremely negative impact on their lives."
She added: “They are not physically and mentally ready. They are almost always pulled out of school so their potential for education is cut off and with that, their potential to work and contribute to their societies both economically and socially.”
Marilyn Crawshaw, who is involved with a non-governmental organization that works with women in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan, said such marriages put girls' health and welfare at risk.

“If you children as some sort of bargaining chip or commodity that has a value attached to it, that is always bad for them," said Crawshaw, who is chairwoman of the UK Friends of Khwendo Kor. "The price is paid by the child."

Memon, who launched the bill, says she plans to turn the tables on clerics opposing the tougher penalties by using Islamic doctrine to justify it.

“Islam is the religion which is the most progressive for women,” she said. “We are looking forward to the committee hearing where we will give Islamic arguments and data from Islamic countries to prove that the amendments we are suggesting are Islamic, democratic and progressive.”




Child marriage
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the 2005 American film documentary, see Child Marriage (film).

Child marriages were common in human history. Above is the portrait of Princess Emilia of Saxony, in 1533, at age 16 married George the Pious, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, then 48 years old.

Child marriage is defined as a formal marriage or informal union entered into by an individual before reaching the age of 18.[1] While child marriage is observed for both boys and girls, the overwhelming majority of those affected by the practice are girls, most of whom are in poor socioeconomic situations.[2] It is related to child betrothal and teenage pregnancy.

In many cases, only one marriage-partner is a child, usually the female, due to importance placed upon female virginity. Child marriages are also driven by poverty, bride price, dowry, cultural traditions, laws that allow child marriages, religious and social pressures, regional customs, fear of remaining unmarried, illiteracy, and perceived inability of women to work for money.

Child marriages were common throughout human history. Today, child marriages are still fairly widespread in some developing areas of the world, such as parts of Africa,[3][4] South Asia,[5] Southeast and East Asia,[6][7] West Asia,[8][9] Latin America,[8] and Oceania.[10] The incidence rates of child marriage have been falling in most parts of the world. The five nations with the highest observed rates of child marriages in the world, below the age of 18, are Niger, Chad, Mali, Bangladesh and Guinea.[11] The top three nations with greater than 20% rates of child marriages below the age of 15 are Niger, Bangladesh and Guinea.[12]

As many as 1 in 3 girls in developing areas of the world are married before reaching the age of 18, and an estimated 1 in 9 girls in developing countries are married by age 15. One of the most commons causes of death for girls aged 15 to 19 in developing countries was pregnancy and child birth.[13] To protect vulnerable children from exploitation, various age of consent and marriageable age laws have been made.





Age 16 for girls and 18 for boys is the minimum age for marrying in Pakistan except for “some parts of the country,” where the age is younger. Also, young girls may even be given in marriage to resolve a feud. All this sounds downright primitive to me, like clitoral circumcision. Feuds have ceased to exist in the US. One of the last, or the most famous at any rate, was between the Hatfields and the McCoys, two families who were killing each other off in large numbers in the mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky. Wikipedia gives the dates of the feud as 1863 to 1891.

Mountain girls were also married off sometimes as young as 13. Edgar Allen Poe the famous American writer's love match and marriage was with a thirteen year old girl. Sex is probably the most irrational thing that humans are ever involved with, giving rise to an amazing number of odd practices. If you take an anthropology course you will learn about various kinds of group marriages and “kinship” systems that often don't involve blood relationships, but marriage between them are considered incest. That particular anthropology course was one of the most interesting subjects I ever took in college. These things occur in mainly in tribal societies around the world, even up to modern times.

A $10 fine, possibly accompanied by up to a month in jail is the current penalty for participating in an underage marriage. Lawmaker Marvi Memon is attempting to get the fine raised to $1,000 with a jail sentence of up to two years. “It doesn’t make sense medically, and it doesn’t make sense economically, she said. Her bill “has been met with fierce opposition from Pakistan’s conservative religious parties.” The world needs religion to form a basic moral code and to give people hope for the future, but it is all too often responsible for the very worst of social customs. Maulana Muhammad Khan Sherani, who chairs the Council of Islamic Ideology, opposes her bill as being against the teachings of the Koran. Gibran Peshimam, a newspaper editor, said that Sherani “wields considerable power.”

“Islam is the religion which is the most progressive for women,” said Memon. I had heard before that the most stringent rules against the freedom of women come from the norms of the local culture rather than from the teachings of Islam. Memon is going to use, as her argument, the teachings of the Koran to prove the case against child marriage.

It is also true of the Bible that you can, by “cherry picking” your verses, prove any number of arguments by their quotation. When I was young and we would visit my mother's parents we would have long and intricately reasoned discussions after dinner on what the Bible actually says. My grandfather was a largely self-taught, but intelligent, Scotch believer in the Presbyterian Church and the doctrine of predestination. My father, a Methodist, who was equally fond of arguing the Bible, believed that people are saved by faith and good works. I learned from it all that, though each of the Christian faiths stick firmly to their own set of ideas, if you compare them you can see that individuals come to their own beliefs. Partly as a result of that I am a Unitarian Unversalist. I believe that all people will be saved and all spiritual paths are worthy.




Boxing Champion Klitschko Withdraws from Ukraine Presidential Race – NBC
Reuters

Former Ukrainian heavyweight boxing champion Vitaly Klitschko said on Saturday that he was pulling out of the race for president and would his weight behind billionaire oligarch Petro Poroshenko.

Klitschko's withdrawal, and an announcement by Poroshenko late on Friday that he would stand in the May 25 election, sets up a battle between the man known as the 'Chocolate King' and Ukraine's fiery former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko.
"The only chance of winning is to nominate one candidate from the democratic forces,'' Klitschko told a meeting of his UDAR (Punch) party, saying he backed Poroshenko.




Poroshenko, who stands against the annexation of Crimea by Russia and is the more popular candidate, and Tymoshenko who is in favor of “Ukrainian unity” and “direct action” according to the website http://www.euronews.com/2014/03/29/tymoshenko-and-poroshenko-plan-to-run-for-ukrainian-presidency/, will compete for President on May 25. Whoever wins will likely be in opposition to Russian future moves against Ukraine.

Putin called Obama yesterday to discuss a “diplomatic solution” to the problem which Kerry had proposed earlier. Let's hope there is some truth to that avowed desire on Putin's part. His actions seem to speak louder than his words, however. The world is watching his amassing of Russian troops in Crimea, with a possible eye to entering another part of Ukraine Transnistria and from there on to Moldava. That comes from the New York Times article yesterday of the phone call. See http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/world/europe/putin-calls-obama-on-Ukraine.html?hpw&rref=world&_r=0 for the full article.

Obama continues to insist on Putin's pulling his troops out of Crimea, and Putin is complaining of “extremists” causing trouble inside Ukraine and called for “the global community” to intervene to establish more stability. Putin is to send a written proposal to Washington, and both men pledged to send representatives – Kerry and Lavrov – to discuss the plans for a diplomatic solution. I am a little more hopeful now, but am continuing to watch the news closely.





Diet Drinks Linked With Heart Disease, Death – NBC
By Maggie Fox

Women who drink the most diet sodas may also be more likely to develop heart disease and even to die, according to a new study published Saturday.
Researchers found women who drank two or more diet drinks a day were 30 percent more likely to have a heart attack or other cardiovascular “event,” and 50 percent more likely to die, than women who rarely touch such drinks.

The findings, being presented at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology, don’t suggest that the drinks themselves are killers. But women who toss back too many diet sodas may be trying to make up for unhealthy habits, experts say.
“Our study suggests an association between higher diet drink consumption and mortality,” said Dr. Ankur Vyas, a cardiovascular disease expert at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinic, who led the study.

“It’s not an extreme risk,” he added.
Research has long shown that artificially sweetened drinks are not health drinks. While they may help people avoid more dangerous sugary sodas, studies show they don't help people lose weight.

Vyas’s team studied nearly 60,000 middle-aged women taking part in a decade-long study of women’s health. They filled out a questionnaire on food and drinks as part of the study, including detailed questions on diet sodas and diet fruit drinks.
After just under nine years, the researchers checked to see what happened to the womens’ health. They found that 8.5 percent of the women who drank two or more diet drinks a day had some sort of heart disease, compared to 6.8 percent of those who drank four or fewer drinks a week and 7.2 percent in those who drank none or just a couple a month.

“We only found an association, so we can’t say that diet drinks cause these problems,” Vyas said.

And that’s a fairly low risk, given that heart disease is the No. 1 killer in the United States and is very, very common.

The women who drank the most drinks were also more likely to smoke, to be overweight, to have diabetes and to have high blood pressure, Vyas noted.
About one in five people in the U.S. consume diet drinks on a given day, according to federal survey data.




Women who drink two or more diet drinks a day can have 30% greater chance of heart attack and are 50% more likely to die. That is bad news to me. I have a good friend who does drink many diet sodas. Personally, I don't like the taste of them, and just go ahead and use sugared drinks. Even with those I don't often drink a soda of any kind. I had a Coke habit when I was in my twenties, but stopped due to my doctor's recommendation. I don't miss them now. If I want caffeine I drink coffee and most of what I drink is water or milk.




U.S. Cyber Defense Force to Hit 6,000 by 2016, Hagel says – NBC
By Courtney Kube
First published March 28 2014

The U.S. cyber defense force will grow to 6,000 people by 2016, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Friday in his first major cyber policy speech.

After his predecessor, Leon Panetta, repeatedly warned of the possibility of a "cyber Pearl Harbor" and extolled the importance of deterring threats against U.S. infrastructure, Hagel emphasized that the U.S. military's main priority is deescalation and restraint.

“That is DoD's overriding purpose in cyberspace as well," Hagel said at the retirement ceremony for Gen. Keith Alexander, the chief of the National Security Agency and head of the U.S. Cyber Command.

"Consistent with these efforts, DoD will maintain an approach of restraint to any cyber operations outside of U.S. government networks. We are urging other nations to do the same," Hagel said.

But Hagel announced that the size of the U.S. cyber defense workforce will grow to more than 6,000 by 2016, and a senior defense official said that the fiscal year 2015 cyber budget will exceed $5 billion.

The speech at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., comes just days before Hagel travels to China, the epicenter of many cyberattacks against the U.S. — even though the U.S. can rarely prove whether those attacks are state-sponsored or not.
Hagel also said that U.S. reliance on cyberspace "outpaces our cybersecurity," and noted that during the course of his brief speech, Defense Department "systems will have been scanned by adversaries around 50,000 times."

A senior defense official explained that those "scans" are the equivalent of someone rattling the doors and shaking the windows when trying to break into a house.
This was the first live broadcast from the NSA/CYBERCOM headquarters, a fact that the senior defense official said demonstrated an effort for greater openness on U.S. defense cyber activities.

Gen. Alexander was the longest-serving NSA director in the agency's history, and he was the first director of CYBERCOM, formed in 2010. Alexander will be replaced by Adm. Michael Rogers.




What is the US Cyber Defense Force? From the following website http://defensesystems.com/articles/2014/02/13/cyber-framework.aspx, comes this concerning the US Cyber Defense Force:
“The cybersecurity framework was released Feb. 12 by the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in response to a February 2013 executive order focusing on improving the cybersecurity of critical U.S. Infrastructure.... The Framework focuses on using business drivers to guide cybersecurity activities and considering cybersecurity risks as part of the organization’s risk management processes,” the NIST report states. …. Industry groups praised the effort but noted that security professionals still aren’t equipped to cope with rapidly evolving cyber threats. 'The lack of qualified information security professionals with the skills and knowledge to create, understand and implement such programs remains an area of improvement that must be further addressed,' W. Hord Tipton, executive director of the information security group (ISC)2, said.”




Christian school pressures 8-year-old 'tomboy' to transfer – CBS
AP March 28, 2014

FOREST, Va. - Eight-year-old Sunnie Kahle likes to keep her hair short, wear boys' clothes, collect hunting knives and shoot her BB gun.

"She's a pure, 100 percent tomboy," said her great-grandfather Carroll Thompson, who along with his wife Doris adopted their granddaughter's child.

But to Timberlake Christian School administrators, the second-grader's boyish ways warranted an ultimatum: Start acting like a girl or find another school.

The Thompsons found another school, but they didn't go quietly. After being told by lawyers that they have no grounds for a lawsuit because Timberlake is a private school, the Thompsons have gone public with their complaints, reported by CBS affiliate WDBJ earlier in the week.

"I don't see nothing Christian about it," 66-year-old Carroll Thompson said in an interview at the family's house just outside Lynchburg, home of Liberty University, the Christian school founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Doris Thompson holds the letter she received from Timberlake Christian School in Forest, Va. on March 26, 2014 asking her great grand daughter Sunnie Kahle to either dress and act more feminine or not enroll again because she looked too much like a boy.

Doris Thompson, who's 69, said she was stunned when she received a letter last month saying the school can deny enrollment to applicants for condoning "sexual immorality," homosexuality or alternative gender identity.

Principal Becky Bowman wrote that "we believe that unless Sunnie as well as her family clearly understand that God has made her female and her dress and behavior need to follow suit with her God-ordained identity, that TCS is not the best place for her future education."

Doris Thompson said Sunnie knows she is a girl and has never, to her knowledge, wished she were a boy.

Other disputes over gender expression at school have made headlines recently, including a demand, later rescinded, that a 9-year-old North Carolina boy cease carrying a My Little Pony backpack to school. But that case and others involved public schools rather than private religious academies that are not subject to anti-discrimination laws.

After a television news report about the Thompsons created a social media frenzy, the school retained the legal arm of Liberty University to tell its side. Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, said there is more to the situation than the Thompsons are saying.

"This is not at all about how she is dressing or she is going through a phase," Staver said in a telephone interview.

However, he said confidentiality laws prevented him from being more specific and school officials would rather not try to rebut the Thompsons' allegations. Earl Prince, an administrator at the school, also declined to discuss what prompted Bowman's letter.

Doris Thompson said she is unaware of anything, other than Sunnie's appearance and tomboy ways, that would prompt the school's action. She said Sunnie made good grades, was well-behaved and got along with the other children. New classmates would sometimes ask if she were a boy or a girl, but she would answer and that would be the end of it, Thompson said.

Bowman acknowledged in her letter that the school's position doesn't stem from Sunnie's grades or "general cooperation with school rules."

Staver said school officials were dismayed that the Thompsons chose not to resolve the issue with them privately. He said school officials would like to have Sunnie back.




Christianity has become so politically active that it sometimes forgets the central doctrine of love above all other things. That includes many in both the Catholic and the Evangelical Protestant churches. As Sunnie's great grandfather Carroll Thompson said, “I don't see nothing Christian about it." Mat Staver, of Liberty Counsel implied that there was some sexual behavior involved as well, but declined to be specific due to confidentiality issues.

Doris Thompson her great grandmother said that new classmates would sometimes ask if she were a boy or a girl, “but she would answer and that would be the end of it,” so apparently she looks enough like a boy that some people are confused. I noticed from her photograph that she is quite a bit overweight, which would compound the problem. Girls are generally more lightly built than boys.

It is a well-known fact that girls often “go through a phase” of being Tomboys, but usually that is a matter of interests and activity preferences rather than sexual involvement, and when the girl reaches sexual maturity she magically likes boys and begins to dress and act in a more feminine fashion. Whatever the case with that, though, I have never heard of a school issuing such a demand as this school did. Schools generally accept the idiosyncrasies of the child and if bullying occurs the school will try to protect the victim. I can't help thinking that Sunnie is better off in a less restrictive learning environment anyway.

The other case mentioned in this article of the boy who was using the My Little Pony backpack was, again, very unusual. The school in that case told him and his parents not to bring the backpack to school anymore because he was being bullied. This girl has not been bullied, makes good grades and conforms in her other behavior. Some schools make rules mandating that all girls are to wear skirts. When I was going through we were not allowed to wear pants of any kind to school. Of course, adult women wearing pants was very unusual then, too. It was the 1950s.




­ Custom Chromo: First Yeast Chromosome Built From Scratch – NPR
by Richard Harris
March 27, 2014

­ Using the labor of dozens of undergraduate students, scientists have built a customized yeast chromosome from scratch.

It's a milestone in the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology, where organisms can be tailored for industrial use. In this case, the near-term goal is to understand the genetics of yeast, and eventually the genetics of us.

This was quite an undertaking. Yeast have about 6,000 genes packed in 16 tidy bundles called chromosomes. Each chromosome is an enormous molecule of DNA packed in proteins.

The story started about 15 years ago, when Ronald Davis, a prominent Stanford University geneticist, stood up at a science meeting and declared that someday someone would build a yeast chromosome from scratch.

"I remember saying to myself, 'Why on Earth world anyone do that?' " says geneticist Jef Boeke, who was then working at Johns Hopkins University.

About 10 years later, Boeke bumped into a Hopkins colleague, Srinivasan Chandrasegaran, at a coffee shop and they started talking about huge molecules they could synthesize. Boeke suggested they could build a yeast chromosome from scratch, "and he looks at me incredulous and said, ' Really? We've got to do it! We've got to do it,' " Boeke recalls. Chandrasegaran "was practically jumping up and down with excitement," Boeke says.

At first, Boeke tried to buy some of the DNA strands they wanted to use from a commercial outfit. But the first small batch took nearly a year to arrive.
“ The students are learning techniques that are transferable to many other organisms and, because you have this fantastic power to modify DNA, it comes with responsibilities.

- Debra Mathews
"I realized I would be dead long before the project could ever be completed," he says. "So it suddenly hit me that there were all these students on the undergraduate campus who would be dying for a great research opportunity."

Boeke and his colleagues put together a class, called Build-A-Genome, and got undergraduates at Hopkins to do the painstaking labor of constructing long strings of DNA. These would eventually become segments of their yeast chromosome.

They published evidence of their success Thursday in Science. The team built yeast chromosome No. 3 from scratch. (More precisely, they assembled the DNA strand that's the core of the chromosome, and put it in a yeast cell, which then proceeded to package it up in proteins and coil it into the compact structure of a chromosome.)
To make the chromosome useful for research, they've deleted some parts of the DNA that they believe are not essential, "and then we add a number of bells and whistles to the chromosome, that we think will make for a more interesting version that we can play evolutionary games with in the laboratory," Boeke says.

They're interested in going after big questions, such as what is it in the DNA that keeps one species separate from the next.

Of course, this deep manipulation of DNA also raises ethical questions — about everything from patenting life-forms, to the potential misuse of biotechnology for weapons or other nefarious purposes. So part of the class involved an ethics discussion, led by Debra Mathews, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins.

"It's not just this particular project," Mathews says, noting that yeast aren't likely to be the starting point for anything that might harm humans. But, she adds, "the students are learning techniques that are transferable to many other organisms and, because you have this fantastic power to modify DNA, it comes with responsibilities."

Ronald Davis, who long ago suggested that someone would eventually do this, says he's impressed with the result. He says you might be tempted to dismiss this as a stunt, "but when it's with yeast, it's not a stunt. It's a milestone event in my opinion."

If scientists can build all 16 yeast chromosomes from scratch, they'd have an entire set of yeast genes to tinker with. That could be a big advance for understanding how genes work, in yeast — and by extension in humans. We have similar chromosomes.
"You can look at a car and you think you understand a car," Davis says. "But if you really understand a car you should be able to build one."

Jef Boeke is now working to build other yeast chromosomes. He recently became director of the Institute for Systems Genetics at New York University's Langone Medical Center, and he's become part of an international consortium that aims to build the remaining 15 yeast chromosomes from scratch. So far, people were working on all but one of them.

"If there's a millionaire out there who would like chromosome 16 named after them, tell them to get in touch!" Boeke says, and smiles.




So we have a new field of biology, “synthetic biology.” It's a little scary to me for scientists to be building DNA and maybe eventually a life form. Scientists make mistakes sometimes. I think the nuclear bomb was a mistake. I hope the new yeasts don't end up being geared to use in “germ warfare,” or simply becoming a harmful organism by some accident. Did you read The Andromeda Strain? That was a great book. The strain was made in the laboratory and, through mismanagement, was introduced to the outside world to became a new plague. That was really a page turner!