Women and Girls

Afghanistan Marks 1 Year Since Taliban Seizure As Woes Mount

Bearded Taliban fighters, some hoisting rifles or the white banners of their movement, staged small victory parades on foot, bicycles and motorcycles.

The Taliban on Monday marked a year since they seized the Afghan capital of Kabul, a rapid takeover that triggered a hasty escape of the nation’s Western-backed leaders, sent the economy into a tailspin and fundamentally transformed the country.

Bearded Taliban fighters, some hoisting rifles or the white banners of their movement, staged small victory parades on foot, bicycles and motorcycles in the streets of the capital. One small group marched past the former U.S. Embassy, chanting “Long live Islam” and “Death to America.”

A year after the dramatic day, much has changed in Afghanistan. The former insurgents struggle to govern and remain internationally isolated. The economic downturn has driven millions more Afghans into poverty and even hunger, as the flow of foreign aid slowed to a trickle.

Meanwhile, hard-liners appear to hold sway in the Taliban-led government, which imposed severe restrictions on access to education and jobs for girls and women, despite initial promises to the contrary. A year on, teenage girls are still barred from school and women are required to cover themselves head-to-toe in public, with only the eyes showing.

Some are trying to find ways to keep education from stalling for a generation of young women and underground schools in homes have sprung up.

Natalia Kanem, executive director of the U.N.’s sexual and reproductive health agency, said in a statement that Afghan females must not be forgotten.

“As the world faces multiple, overlapping crises, we must not forget the women and girls of Afghanistan. When women’s and girls’ basic rights are denied, we are all diminished,” she said.

A year ago, thousands of Afghans had rushed to Kabul International Airport to flee the Taliban amid the U.S. military’s chaotic withdrawal from Kabul after 20 years of war — America’s longest conflict.

Some flights resumed relatively quickly after those chaotic days. On Monday, a handful of commercial flights were scheduled to land and take off from a runway that last summer saw Afghan men clinging to the wheels of planes taking off, some falling to their death.

Schoolyards stood empty Monday as the Taliban announced a public holiday to mark the day, which they refer to as “The Proud Day of Aug. 15” and the “First Anniversary of the Return to Power.”

“Reliance on God and the support of the people brought this great victory and freedom to the country,” wrote Abdul Wahid Rayan, the head of the Taliban-run Bakhtar News Agency. “Today, Aug. 15, marks the victory of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan against America and its allies occupation of Afghanistan.”

During a gathering to mark the anniversary, the Taliban deputy prime minister, Abdul Salam Hanafi, offered congratulations to “the entire nation on the day of the conquest of Kabul, which was the beginning of the complete end of the occupation.”

In remarks broadcast live by state radio and TV, he boasted of what he described as “great achievements” under the Taliban, such as an alleged end of corruption, improved security and banned poppy cultivation.

On the eve of the anniversary, former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani defended what he said was a split-second decision to flee, saying he wanted to avoid the humiliation of surrender to the insurgents. He told CNN that on the morning of Aug. 15, 2021, with the Taliban at the gates of Kabul, he was the last one at the presidential palace after his guards had disappeared.

Tomas Niklasson, the European Union’s special envoy to Afghanistan, said the bloc of nations remains committed to the Afghan people and to “stability, prosperity and sustainable peace in Afghanistan and the region.”

“This will require an inclusive political process with full, equal and meaningful participation of all Afghan men and women and respect for human rights,” Niklasson wrote.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said an international responsibility toward Afghanistan remains after the NATO withdrawal.

“A regime that tramples on human rights cannot under any circumstances be recognized,” she said in a statement. “But we must not forget the people in Afghanistan, even a year after the Taliban takeover.”

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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Indiana Republicans Propose Banning Abortion With Exceptions

By Associated Press
July 20, 2022

The move comes amid a political firestorm over a 10-year-old rape victim who came to the state from neighboring Ohio to end her pregnancy.

Leaders of Indiana’s Republican-dominated Senate on Wednesday proposed banning abortion with limited exceptions — a move that comes amid a political firestorm over a 10-year-old rape victim who came to the state from neighboring Ohio to end her pregnancy.

The proposal will be taken up during a special legislative session that is scheduled to begin Monday, making Indiana one of the first Republican-run states to debate tighter abortion laws following the U.S. Supreme Court decision last month overturning Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court ruling is expected to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states.

The Indiana proposal would allow exceptions to the ban, such as in cases of rape, incest or to protect a woman’s life. Its fate is uncertain, though, because some hardline Republicans want to ban all abortions.

Ohio’s so-called fetal heartbeat law, which bans abortions after a fetus’ heartbeat can be detected — typically in around the sixth week of pregnancy — led the 10-year-old rape victim to go to Indiana to get a medication-induced abortion on June 30, according to the doctor who performed it.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

Leaders of Indiana’s Republican-dominated Senate were set to reveal Wednesday how aggressive they want a special legislative session to go in further restricting abortions as the state has drawn attention over a 10-year-old rape victim who came from Ohio to get an abortion.

Indiana will be among the first Republican-run states to debate tighter abortion laws following the U.S. Supreme Court decision last month overturning Roe v. Wade as legislators return to the Statehouse beginning Monday for a special session that could last three weeks. The Supreme Court ruling is expected to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states.

Republican lawmakers have pushed through numerous anti-abortion laws over the past decade and the vast majority signed a letter in March supporting a special session on further tightening those laws. But legislative leaders and Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb have been tightlipped since the Supreme Court decision over whether they will push for a full abortion ban or allow exceptions, such as in cases of rape, incest or to protect a woman’s life.

Indiana law generally prohibits abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, with tight restrictions after 13 weeks. Nearly 99% of abortions in the state last year took place at 13 weeks or earlier, according to a state Health Department report.

The leader of the state’s most prominent anti-abortion group told reporters Wednesday it would pressure legislators to advance a bill “that affirms the value of all life including unborn children” while not taking questions on whether any exceptions would be acceptable.

Indiana Right to Life President Mike Fichter said the vast majority of Indiana lawmakers have “campaigned as pro-life, they’ve run multiple election cycles as being pro-life.”

“This is not the time when legislators should be drafting legislation that would appear that Roe versus Wade is still in place,” Fichter said. “Roe is no longer in place. The Roe shield is no longer there.”

Republican Senate leaders were expected Wednesday afternoon to discuss their proposal for abortion restrictions along with another providing “support for new and expectant mothers.”

Democrats have criticized Republicans for meeting privately for weeks over the abortion legislation.

“If anything, what we should be spending our time on is preparing, strengthening our safety net before we began to take away access to abortion care in this state,” said Democratic Sen. Shelli Yoder of Bloomington.

The state’s debate comes as an Indiana doctor has been at the center of a political firestorm after speaking out about a 10-year-old child abuse victim who traveled from Ohio for an abortion.

A 27-year-old man was charged in Columbus, Ohio, last week with raping the girl, confirming the existence of a case initially met with skepticism by some media outlets and Republican politicians. The pushback grew after Democratic President Joe Biden expressed empathy for the girl during the signing of an executive order aimed at protecting some abortion access.

Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, said she gave the girl a medication-induced abortion on June 30 because the child couldn’t get the procedure in Ohio under a newly imposed state ban on abortions from the time a fetus’ cardiac activity can be detected. A judge lifted a stay on the Ohio ban after the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Indiana’s conservative GOP lawmakers have had a history of conflict over social issues. In May, they overrode a veto by Holcomb of a bill that banned transgender women and girls from participating in school sports that match their gender identity.

That came seven years after Indiana faced a national uproar over a religious objections law signed by then-Gov. Mike Pence that opponents maintained could be used to discriminate against gays and lesbians. The Republican-dominated Legislature quickly made revisions blocking its use as a legal defense for refusing to provide services and preventing the law from overriding local ordinances with LGBT protections.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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Payment Data Could Become Evidence of Abortion, Now Illegal in Some States

Digital payments are the default for millions of women of childbearing age. So what will their credit and debit card issuers and financial app providers do when prosecutors seek their transaction data during abortion investigations?

It’s a hypothetical question that’s almost certainly an inevitable one in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade last week. Now that abortion is illegal in several states, criminal investigators will soon begin their hunt for evidence to prosecute those they say violated the law.

Medical records are likely to be the most definitive proof of what now is a crime, but officials who cannot get those may look for evidence elsewhere. The payment trail is likely to be a high priority.

HIPAA — which governs the privacy of a patient’s health records — permits medical and billing records to be released in response to a warrant or subpoena.

“There is a very broad exception to the HIPAA protections for law enforcement,” said Marcy Wilder, a partner and co-head of the global privacy and cybersecurity practice at Hogan Lovells, a law firm. But Ms. Wilder added that the information shared with law enforcement officials could not be overly broad or unrelated to the request. “That is why it matters how companies and health plans are interpreting this.”

Card issuers and networks like Visa and Mastercard generally do not have itemized lists of everything that people pay for when they shop for prescription drugs or other medications online, or when they purchase services at health care providers. But evidence of patronage of, say, a pharmacy that sells only abortion pills could give someone away.

a new state law authorizes residents to file lawsuits against anyone who helped facilitate an abortion.

“With the ruling only coming down late last week, it’s premature to understand the full impact at the state level,” Brad Russell, a USAA spokesman, said via email. “However, USAA will always comply with all applicable laws.”

American Airlines Credit Union, Bank of America, Capital One, Discover, Goldman Sachs, Prosperity Bank USA, Navy Federal Credit Union, US Bank, University of Wisconsin Credit Union, Wells Fargo and Western Union did not return at least two messages seeking comment.

American Express, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo have all announced their intentions to reimburse employees for expenses if they travel to other states for abortions. So far, none have commented about how they would respond to a subpoena seeking the transaction records of the very employees who would be eligible for employer reimbursement.

Amie Stepanovich, vice president of U.S. policy at the Future of Privacy Forum, a nonprofit focused on data privacy and protection, said warrants and subpoenas can be accompanied by gag orders, which can prevent companies from even alerting their customers that they’re being investigated.

“They can choose to battle the use of gag orders in court,” she said. “Sometimes they win, sometimes they don’t.”

Researchers say prevention efforts can help reduce the amount of kids dying from gun violence, but more data is also needed to understand why.

Gun violence in the U.S. is nothing new, but things are getting worse. More Americans died from gun injuries in 2020 than any other year on record, but one group being particularly impacted is kids.

A new analysis found guns are the leading cause of death for children in the U.S. since 2017, surpassing car crash deaths.

Kids have been shot and killed while rider their bikes, walking home from school and even playing video games.

This is a uniquely American problem. Kids in the U.S. are 15 times more likely to die from guns than kids in 31 other high-income countries combined.

Researchers say gun violence has become the number one cause of death for kids because, while it has increased, there has also been a decrease in car crash fatalities. Cars, however, have a specific regulatory agency. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was established in 1970, which had a public database of car deaths to help researchers better understand how road safety can be improved. Things like side airbags, booster-seat laws and automatic braking all helped make kids safer.

On the other hand, there is no federal agency to regulate the safety of guns. Funding was just granted to the CDC in 2019 to begin research for preventing gun injuries, so the research is far less extensive than car crash data.

A study from the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that 9 million children ages 5 to 17 lived in a neighborhood that experienced at least one fatal shooting a year from 2015 to 2019. It also found Black kids compared to white kids were at a higher risk of being exposed to gun violence before the pandemic. Since then, the disparity has grown even more.

To combat this issue, researchers say that, just like with car safety, prevention efforts can help.

In Dayton, Ohio, the local YWCA works on preventing gun violence through two programs for middle and high schoolers.

“We’re hearing from our students just hugely disproportionate levels of stress coming at them from a number of different ways, and I think when you look at gun violence, one of the biggest things is that they feel completely out of control in terms of you don’t know who’s carrying a firearm around with you,” said Audrey Starr, vice president of mission, brand and programs at YWCA Dayton. “There’s kind of that constant threat and that constant potential.”

Kids can suffer gun injuries from accidental shootings, getting caught in the crossfire, suicides and also intimate partner violence.

“You see big socioeconomic disparities in our communities,” Starr said. “You have families with big financial strains… All of this kind of comes to a head a lot of times in things like interpersonal violence, in increased levels of suicide among youth in our community. So being able to, as much as we can, be proactive and give them a safe space to talk.”

YWCA Dayton says it has seen quick success with its newest program, AMEND Together, which is aimed at engaging men and boys to prevent violence against women and girls by teaching them what a healthy relationships look like.

“We had an immediate statistical data come back to us that showed from pretest to post-test that we were changing behaviors among the young men in our community and that we were able to see that immediate reaction of, ‘Oh, this makes sense, it is a clear need. We are clearly meeting need,'” Starr said.

In addition to gun risks for youth in Dayton, the city also faced a mass shooting in 2019 where nine people were killed and dozens were injured.

“We had staff members who lost family members, we had clients who lost family members,” Starr said. “We had our youth programs, right, who were then going into the classroom immediately thereafter with these kids who heard about it, knew about it, had family involved and we’re having to work through that on top of all of the things that they were already dealing with in the day to day. I think it just really put it into perspective how things can change so quickly, but then it also immediately put us into this national conversation of ‘How do we reduce violence in our communities?'”

A CBS News analysis found that nearly 300 kids aged 16 and under were shot in Chicago last year.

“Children are being bored,” Saleshea McCray, founder of Hug a Child Make a Change, said. “I feel that they are getting their hands into different things, that some children come from broken homes, and there’s not enough mental health resources out here. The children are losing their friends to death, and nobody is checking in with them for therapy. Nobody’s checking into mental health to say ‘Are you okay?’ because they’re numb, and they’re believing this is normal when it’s not.

Groups like Hug a Child Make a Change are working on prevention efforts across the city.

“We get the children together, and we march for peace to let them know that we are fighting for them,” McCray said. “We are fighting for them to live and not to die in the city of Chicago.”

The organization connects kids with mentors that meet and check in several times a month to offer support and help them reach major life milestones.

“My program helped because we’re involved in these children’s lives,” McCray said. “We have graduates coming across the stage this year with honors classes because they have a shoulder to lean on and a foundation of people. So, I feel like my program has helped tremendously because we’ve not only worked with the children, but we work with the parents, the mothers, the fathers, the sisters, the brothers, we work with them.”

These community outreach efforts are vital when it comes to tackling the root of the problem, but some researchers say more data is needed to better understand what is happening with gun violence.

: newsy.com

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