Rape victim is denied contraception pill

   
 It seems like everyday you get to hear stories that make you ask yourself are we actually living in the 21 century in a free world?
      This is one of those stories.
       A woman , that we are going to simply call R.W. in order not to disclose her identity ,was the unfortunate victim of a rape. After she was examined at Tampa's Rape Crisis Center, the doctor provided two anti-contraception pills for her to take. 
 While she was reporting the crime, however, an arrest warrant on her name was found for failure to pay restitution and failure to appear. Being detained at Hillsborough County Jail, her pills were confiscated by the staff who refused to return them so R.W. could  take them.
     Michele Spinelli, jail employee, motivated her actions on religious beliefs. Even though eventually she did not get pregnant, R.W. decided to sue the jail guard and Hillsborough County Sheriff David Gee for gender discrimination and violations of the right to privacy and the right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment.
      Is the Sheriff accountable for Spinelli's actions?
      Even though judge Kovachevich dismissed the claims against Gee, she did wrote :"The single action of a final policy-maker can represent official government policy, even when the action is not meant to control later decisions. [...]Gee, as the representative of the municipality, promulgated no policy on anticonceptive medication and provided no guidance or supervision to Spinelli on the matter. Given that some entity must set policy for the government in each situation, plaintiff has rendered plausible the claim that Spinelli was designated the final policy-maker with respect to her decision to withhold anti-conceptive medication for religious reasons.”

   What I found so disturbing about this case is how religion has made some people think they have the right to decide about other people's life, even when that goes against the law.
    I wonder what would happen if Michele Spinelli herself would have been the victim of a rape. Would she still be so firm into defending her beliefs? It's easy to be pose as righteous when the other person must facec the consequences of your decisions. It may be easy to say that is wrong to use contraceptives when you're not the on who has to live with this decision, when you're not the one who has to raise the child, and provide for him , while trying to erase the horrible memory of how that child was conceived.
    
    As a common thing for all rape cases, nobody is there to help the victims when they are assaulted, but a lot of people tend to emerge afterwards with their opinions and lessons on morality .

     On an unrelated note, in New York, many schools have started banning words on standardized tests that might be considered offensive. Words like "birthday", or "dinosaur" because some of the kids attending those schools belong to a religion that doesn't accept the existence of dinosaurs, or doesn't celebrate birthdays.( I guess musems should be next)

    It makes me ask, when did we get to be so intolerant with other people religions that we decided the best way to deal with it is to ignore the subject all together? We are either going to shove our point of view down the other person's throat or just politely change the subject, since apparently we are not able to cope with the fact that other people like us may have other opinions and that we should respect their opinion even though we don't agree with it.

    In Michigan , the Sikh community was revolted after a student was denied the right to carry a religious sword at school. Now this is an elementary school we are talking about. Imagine your kid getting in a fight with another kid on the playground, which is a pretty common thing, except the other kid carries a sword with him always.

    There is such thing as religion and then there's common sense. You can not use religion as an  excuse to break law, and do whatever you like just because your belief demands it .  Respecting another person 's belief should be done is such a way you don't offend the other, which may be pretty hard , but not impossible if we all agree that our beliefs are just different point of views, and none of us holds the absolute truth.
      
    

1984 in 2012

   

 George Orwell's famous novel "1984" may soon become a genuine prophecy about today's society, in almost every way, with one exception - his dystopian society was never THAT controlling.
     In London, British authorities are very excited about their new plan for a surveillance program that will be able to store information about every phone call, text message email or Web page visited on U.K. territory.

    The government promises they are not set up to invade personal lives, and that no email will be read nor phone call listened without a proper warrant. Yet one can just imagine where could such an act lead and where our society may be heading when everything about a person can be carefully monitored by the state.

      Home Office Secretary Theresa May gives a very cold and somewhat threating response in an editorial for The Sun: 
       “Our proposals are sensible and limited,” she says.  “They will give the police and some other agencies access to data about online communications to tackle crime, exactly as they do now with mobile phone calls and texts. Unless you are a criminal, then you've nothing to worry about from this new law.”



     "Unless you are a criminal , then you've nothing to worry about from this new law" - Who else would find this line suitable for an iconic villain? Maybe I'm just overreacting, but nevertheless, what is the price of security? And is it possible that such a power could end up being used for purposes different from those intended?
      
     David Davis, conservative party politician and member of Parliament, declared  “This is a huge amount of information, very intrusive to collect on people.  It’s not content, but it’s incredibly intrusive.”



      He is not the only one shocked by this bill.  Human rights defenders ,  authorities and civil libertarians and many others, down to your normal every day citizen were just flabbergasted. 

    On the other hand, May keeps a firm tone.  “Without changing the law the only freedom we would protect is that of criminals, terrorists and pedophiles,” she says. 



     So the only solution could be regarding every living citizen as a suspect and 24 hour monitoring of their everyday activities? Obviously this is a statement from someone who's not very savy of the whole "Internet business", but every guy who spends most of his free time in front of their screen could tell you that everyone is perfectly normal until you check his browser's history. 
    Hopefully there are plenty of rooms in U.K prisons. 

Improper dosage of prozac leads to murderous behaviour

     
      A couple of years ago, Alyssa Bustamante was just another misunderstood teen with a defiant glaze and a goth look. Now recently turned 18, she's serving a life sentence in jail after found guilty for the murder of nine years old   Elizabeth Olten.
But what could have lead to such horrible violent act from this apparently normal teen from Missouri?
       Is Alyssa Bustamante a monster in disguise or could it be that her acts were strongly influenced by the negative effects of the a high dosage of antidepressants?

       A boy in Canada , although experimenting with various drugs at the early age of 15, had reportedly no violent tendencies killed his friend with a kitchen knife. Those who knew him said his personality changed radically after being prescribed Prozac. Even the judge presiding his case stated that drugs such as Prozac and other antidepressants may have extremely negative effects on teen, that often lead to violence towards themselves or others.
       In UK, a boy under 18 beat his father to death after taking high doses of Prozac and  citalopram, a drug that was illegal for patients under the legal age. In Germany  Tim Kretschmer opened fire on his classmates without saying a word, just like it was in a video game. It's clear he couldn't have been lucid at the moment, but could his brain be altered by medication in such a way he was unable to realize what was happening?
     
       The fact that drugs are killing teenagers all over the world may sound almost like a cliché, something wide accepted as a downsize of our modern world, something we don't really want to hear about until it happens in our neighborhood. But these are not the generic illegal drugs sold on on a back alley, these are legal drugs , prescribed by doctors for patients who are trying to overcome their problems.
        Prozac side-effects have created news about suicidal teens and shocking brutal murders, but should we blame the pharmaceutical companies or the doctors for giving wrong prescriptions?
        The theory that pharmaceuticals companies such as  Eli Lilly  purposely hid informations from the public about their products, information that pointed to some test results showing how antidepressants increase suicidal tendency, by causing an imbalance in the brain's biochemicals was regarded as a conspiracy theory, and yet , we are bombarded by the news with more and more tragic stories. 
       We can't help but wondering if these gruesome crimes could have been avoided if companies would have been a little bit more transparent, if doctors would have treated their jobs with a little bit more responsibility and tried to find out what exactly was the problem with these troubled teens before choking them with pills.
Maybe Alyssa Bustamante would have prepared for graduating high school this year, instead of looking at us from behind bars.

Judge in Breivik case, playing cards in court.

   
       Ernst Henning Nielsen, one of the three judges presiding the case of the mass killer from Norway was caught playing cards on his laptop while Mattias Gardell, Swedish religious historian, was addressing court.
It seems, however that the history lesson was not interesting enough for judge Ernst Henning Nielsen who decided to enjoy a game of solitaire before the lunch break.

     The court's first reaction after the cameras caught this goof was to condemn the broadcasters for filming the judge's desk.
 “One of the conditions for broadcasting is that there should be no filming of the judges’ desk. There are notes and documents of a sensitive nature lying there,” said Irene Ramm spokeswoman for the district court. She then came back on a more friendly note : "The judges are attentively following what is being said and what is being presented to the court. There are different ways of staying focused."

    Anders Behring Breivik , age 33 is currently being judged for the attacks on July 22 2011 when he detonated a rigged car near a government building in Oslo. He then debarked on the island of  Utøya where the youth division of the Norvegian Labour Party was organizing a summer camp. Breivik pretended to be a cop and then opened fire killing 69 persons. A total of 77 persons were killed and another 242 were wounded on that tragic day by a man that claims to be leading a holy crusade against multiculturalism and "The muslim invasion" .
    Breivik's intolerance towards muslims may have roots in his early years when he apparently had some problems with some members of the muslim community in his hometown. At 7, his friend's father, Turkish, wrecked his bicycle  and at 15 he had a minor altercation with a Pakistani  underground driver for riding on the outside of a underground car, that ended up with Breivik's being slapped.

    At the moment  the courthouse is trying to establish if the "crusader" is to be sent to a regular prison or an insane asylum. Breivik's has confessed his crimes and denies any responsibility, regarding himself as a hero, but ironically he managed to prove one thing right : terrorism has no religion.