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Adil Ghaffar reports from London on the violence being directed toward the Muetahida Qumai Movement in Pakistan. Disappearances and murder/tortures. MQM is a large political party with seats in government. Major human rights watch NGO’s are reportedly not paying attention. http://www.mqm.org/default.aspx

Roberto Diaz @dieresis_u reports from Mexico City on the abortion decriminalization in Mexico.

Since 2021, abortion has no longer been a federal crime in Mexico. The criminal law in Mexico varies by state. On 7 September 2021, the Mexican Supreme Court unanimously ruled that penalizing abortion is unconstitutional, setting an important precedent across the whole country. Before 2019, abortion had been severely restricted outside of Mexico City, where it was legalized on-request in 2007. As of August 2023, abortion is available on request to any woman during the first twelve weeks of a pregnancy in Mexico City and the states of Oaxaca, Hidalgo, Veracruz, Coahuila, Colima, Baja California, Sinaloa, Guerrero, Baja California Sur, Quintana Roo, and Aguascalientes. However, even in states where abortion is legal, there continue to be women in pre-trial detention for murder due to the spontaneous miscarriages of pregnancies.

On September 6th of the current year 2023, Mexico's The Supreme Court of Justice decriminalized the abortion on a federal level. The sentence was passed after the unanimous vote of the three ministers inside the First CourtRoom. A significant advance in the fight for the reproductive rights of Mexican women, since the latest sentence of 2021, in which criminalizing the abortion became unconstitutional in Mexico.

Because of the Judicial Power internal division, this decriminalizing measure doesn't mean that abortion became legal in the entire Mexican nation, a declaration given by the Subdirector of the civilian association: Group of Information in Chosen Reproduction or (GIRE) in Spanish, the latest verdict doesn't cover 21 of the 32 states of Mexico, as some states haven't modified their own Criminal Code. Nonetheless, the independent jurist, Carla Escoffie confirmed that even though this measure won’t protect women in states in which the abortion is considered a crime, the same measure allows the accused to process a legal protection against the state law and be judged in a federal court.

The controversial result has generated polarizing opinions in the country, from the official’s senator; Olga Sanchez Cordero, who seconded with animosity the Supremes’ court decision, to conservative activist, Irma Barrientos, from the civilian association "Derechos del Concebido" (Conceived Rights) who repudiated the verdict of the maximum entity of justice in Mexico.

The abortion topic is still generating controversy in a country in which 78% of the population considers themselves as catholic. The decriminalizing process for the abortion is still recent, but started to have more impact in the legislative discussions.

1 5 years ago, Mexico City became the first federal entity, where the abortion became legalized and from there, the discussion became stagnated until 2019, when the state of Oaxaca became the first state in decriminalize the abortion in its constitution, then in 2021, a wave of decriminalization processes started in other states, such as Veracruz, Hidalgo, Baja California, Baja California Sur, Colima, Sinaloa, Guerrero and Quintana Roo.

Although some states keep on the fight against the abortion; The state of Mexico is number one on the list of states that have more legal processes against women that have practiced an abortion, in 2021 were reported 149 and in 2021 were 114. The second state is Nuevo Leon with 119 abortion crimes reported in 2021 and 119 in 2022.

Before this measure to decriminalize the abortion in the Mexican country, a study from the Guttmacher Institute, estimated that 54% of all unwanted pregnancies ended in abortion, which translated into more than ...

The E.R.A., a proposed amendment to the Constitution, would guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex. It would also require states to intervene in cases of gender violence, such as domestic violence and sexual harassment; it would guard against pregnancy and motherhood discrimination; and it would federally guarantee equal pay. Duration 00:05:45.

From the N.Y. Times.

ERA could be back in Congress soon.

Why does the E.R.A. matter?

Because women don’t currently have equal protection under the United States Constitution. By some estimates, 80 percent of Americans mistakenly believe that women and men are guaranteed equal rights, but the only right the Constitution explicitly extends to both men and women is the right to vote.

The E.R.A., a proposed amendment to the Constitution, would guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex. It would also require states to intervene in cases of gender violence, such as domestic violence and sexual harassment; it would guard against pregnancy and motherhood discrimination; and it would federally guarantee equal pay.

So just one more state is needed for the E.R.A. to move forward?

It’s a start. Aside from finding another state to ratify, the 1982 deadline would need to be repealed or overruled — an effort to do so is currently in the works by Jerry Nadler, the House judiciary chairman, Robles-Román and Jenkins said. (There are questions about whether a deadline can in fact be imposed for ratifying an amendment.)

Another potential obstacle: Five states have since rescinded their ratifications, though the Constitution speaks only to a state’s power to ratify an amendment, not to the power to rescind a ratification, which may lead to another legal entanglement.

Regardless, there’s renewed hope among supporters, especially with the House now in Democratic control and more women than ever in office. So much of this now is the energy and the momentum.

Full story at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/us/equal-rights-amendment-what-is-it.html

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex. It seeks to end the legal distinctions between men and women in terms of divorce, property, employment, and other matters.[1] The ERA was originally written by Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman, and was first introduced in Congress in December 1923

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment

History of the Equal Rights Amendment

https://www.equalrightsamendment.org/the-equal-rights-amendment

Sandy Oestreich

[email protected]

https://www.facebook.com/sandy.oestreich.3?ref=br_rs

On the 8th Anniversary of the 9-17-2011 OWS we are re-releasing our podcast of the 5th Anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. Dean Edwards introduces Sanna Camera and Aisha Dabo from Dakar, Senegal. Jo Ellen Kaiser moderates.

Roberto Díaz reports https://twitter.com/dieresis_u. On February 22, 2024, during the presidential morning conference, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, revealed a letter sent to him by the Mexico, Central America, and Caribbean bureau of the U.S. newspaper The New York Times. In the letter, the president was asked to respond to a series of questions sent by the newspaper's editor, Natalie Krittoef, with the intention of clarifying alleged illicit financing in his 2018 campaign.

During the press conference, the Mexican president read the letter containing the editor's phone number, which could be considered a violation of Mexico's journalist data protection law. It is worth mentioning that in recent weeks, there have been four attempts to link AMLO to organized crime—a report by DW, another by Pro-Publica, another by Insight Crime, and another by Latinus—all just four months before the presidential elections in Mexico, where all polls indicate the candidate from his political party, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, as the winner. It should be noted that all investigations have resulted in no substantiation.

On February 23, there was an interesting response from Univisión correspondent Jésica Zermeño, who, when questioned about the leak of an editor's phone number that was not private and was already publicly available on LinkedIn, the president's response about a "higher moral law" superior to the law established in the Mexican constitution was enough, fueling an already polarized relationship between his administration and the media.

Even though in 2023, according to the NGO Reporters Without Borders, four journalists were killed and 34 disappeared, making Mexico the second most dangerous country for journalism outside of Gaza, the media has tried to link López Obrador's presidency to the killings. Mainly denouncing "La Mañanera," the morning press conferences, to denigrate often biased work, as was the case with the misinformation spread by Diario de Yucatan about a supposed heart attack suffered by the president, further diminishing a critical stance on the search for evidence to justify the editorial lines pursued by different media outlets which supported the desinformation.

"If she has so much of a problem, she should change her number," was the response given by President AMLO regarding the issue, ignoring that things were only going to get more complicated from there on.

Communication experts, analysts, and national and international journalists, came to the defense of editor Natalie Krittoef due to the phone number leak. It should be noted that while the case of editor Natalie Krittoef went viral and at the same time generated sympathy, a second leak occurred of phone numbers linked to journalists attending "La Mañanera." These were later exploited by trolls and bots on social media to increase hate speech and threats against independent journalists who weren’t antagonistic with the AMLO’s administration.The inaction of organizations such as Article 19 in these cases was already expected. While the organization expressed concern about data leaking from more than 300 journalists attending "La Mañanera," an incident that was revealed on January 26 of this year, for the second leak, they stood silently.

Finally, the propaganda campaign "Change the Number," a campaign carried out by female journalists and actresses very active in the Mexican opposition such as Areli Paz, Paula Ordorica, Azucena Uresti, Lourdes Mendoza, and Denisse Dresser, where through a message on social networks, the journalist said, they were going to leak her number so that people could call them. For those who called expecting to get in touch with the journalists, they only found a pre-recorded message about the number of journ...