Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Nintendo to post unexpected loss as Wii successor falters

TOKYO (Reuters) - Nintendo Co Ltd, the world's leading gaming company by machines sold, said it will post an operating loss for a second straight year as the sales of its Wii U, successor to the 100-million selling Wii, faltered.

The company caught investors off guard by predicting a loss of $220 million in the year to March 31, reversing a profit forecast for the same amount, putting its new guidance well short of a consensus estimate of 12.1 billion yen ($133.48 million) profit from 19 analysts.

The grim outlook came even as a weaker yen provides a boost for a company that sells almost three quarters of its products outside Japan.

"It was a somewhat negative surprise," said Yasuo Sakuma, portfolio manager at Bayview Asset Management.

Nintendo, which began by making playing cards in the late 19th century, is counting on the Wii U to revive its fortunes as sales of the six year-old Wii slacken.

The latest offering from the creator of Super Mario faces competition from Apple Inc and other makers of mobile phones and tablet PCs that are attracting gamers with cheap or free games.

"The sales of Wii U were smooth at the beginning but since the turn of the year they have been losing momentum," Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told reporters in Osaka after revealing the loss forecast. He blamed the lacklustre performance on a dearth of games titles to woo players back.

"Due to delays in software development, we had to postpone sales of software products we had planned to (release) early this year, which is interrupting our sales," he said.

SOFTWARE SLUMP

Nintendo lowered its sales forecast for the Wii U, launched in the U.S. in November, to 4 million consoles by the end of March from a pre-launch estimate of 5.5 million, and cut the sales outlook for its handheld 3DS by 2.5 million machines to 15 million.

In November it launched the Wii U, its first console in 16 years to come with a dedicated Super Mario game title.

The performance of the Wii U, which features a "Gamepad" controller that functions like a tablet, and a social gaming network dubbed "Miiverse", will be closely watched by XBox maker Microsoft Corp and Playstation maker Sony Corp as both mull plans for updated versions of their consoles, say analysts.

As Nintendo's hardware business suffers, software sales are also dragging. The company slashed the annual sales forecast of Wii U software by 33 percent to 24 million units and that of 3DS software by 29 percent to 70 million units.

"We have been prepared to see weak sales forecast for Wii U as its sales performances in various regions have been widely reported. But it was negative to see a lower forecast for 3DS software as it is one of the company's main sales drivers," said Sakuma at Bayview Asset Management.

Nintendo has so far resisted offering Super Mario and its other iconic games on tablets, smartphones or other platforms.

Iwata indicated that Nintendo will stick with its in-house strategy. The company, he said, aims to return to operating profit of more than 100 billion yen in the next business year with a splurge of new software titles.

Before the earnings announcement, Nintendo's shares fell 2.1 percent to 9,350 yen, edging back toward the decade low of 8,500 yen touched early this month.

($1 = 90.6500 Japanese yen)

(Reporting by Tim Kelly and Hideyuki Sano; Additional reporting by Yoshiyuki Osada and Ayai Tomisawa; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nintendo-cuts-sales-target-wii-u-3ds-ds-071455015--finance.html

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I date a divorced woman with 2 kids. I love her. Some problems ...


General Relationship Discussion Although anyone can post anywhere on Talk About Marriage, this section is for people interested in general relationship and marriage advice.


Old Today, 08:15 AM ? #1 (permalink)

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Hey .. I'm super new here. But been having an avid reader and just having an argument with my girlfriend. I decide to post here regarding the problems and feelings I have so far.

Please respond kindly to my post and give a mature and objective opinion. So here it is..

I am 29 years old, single male and she's 35, a working mom, divorced with 2 kids. We've dated for about 6 months so far. I can feel she likes me too, and so do I. We feel fit to each other, we talk about lots of things and we do feel comfortable about our relationship.

But sometimes we just have this argument about her ex. It feels like she's still in doubt to be more open about our relationship, and whenever I push her to be open about us, she's upset.

I asked her the reason she seems reluctant to be open about it. She said she want to "protect" me from her (a bit psycho) ex and "stay out of it" until we have a fully matured relation and prepared to be married. Well does it even make sense or am I the only idiot here?

She's not wearing her ring anymore, in fact she always wear the necklace I gave her AND she also has introduced me to her kids. Well that's a good sign of acceptance, isn't it?

Now the problems, and main questions are:
1. Why she still seems reluctant to be honest about our relationship? Yep she's legally divorced, I checked.

2. It also feels her ex still not fully let her go. She tells me that some time the ex still try to call/text her, asking about the kids. He even still calls her [honey] .. WTF? What should I do about him? I'm cool with her ex calling about kids, but honey? hmm ..

As a side note she's always been trying to push her ex back. He still call her honey but she always waving him away and end the conversation. I can see she try hard to keep her kids closer to me and further from him.

3. Do you think it's okay if I make contact her ex? I really want to know both sides of their (failed) marriage tale? And I really want him to let her go. Is that wrong?

4. Give me general tips about dating, or even maybe marrying a divorced woman with kids? I'm trying at first, but it's really hard to not get attached to her. She's just adorable woman, and mother.

5. How would a remarried woman treat a replacement daddy such as me (assuming I marry her?) People say her kids will always be number 1, and I'm number 2. How bad is it really? Can she still respect me as a husband? Or merely a new guy on the block?

That will be all, let the discussion begin, and thank you so much for your time.

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Old Today, 08:28 AM ? #2 (permalink)

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She may have been abused and have reason for trying to her ex "happy". Or she might still be keeping him as plan B. hard to say. How long have they been separated/divorced? How dependent is she on him financially or any other way?

I would definitely advise NOT contacting him. I think she would take that as going behind her back.

And yes, you will likely be prioritized below the kids in a number of ways. After all, you can take care of yourself and make your own decisions, while the children cannot. Having said that, your needs and concerns need to be taken into account too. It's a balancing act, and compromises will sometimes need to be made.

The only other thing I'd say is that you may be getting too serious too fast. You've only been dating for six months. Give it time, enjoy your time with her, and see where things go. Maybe she's just looking for fun, not a life partner?

C

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Old Today, 08:33 AM ? #4 (permalink)

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Quote:

She may have been abused and have reason for trying to her ex "happy". Or she might still be keeping him as plan B. hard to say. How long have they been separated/divorced? How dependent is she on him financially or any other way?

I would definitely advise NOT contacting him. I think she would take that as going behind her back.

And yes, you will likely be prioritized below the kids in a number of ways. After all, you can take care of yourself and make your own decisions, while the children cannot. Having said that, your needs and concerns need to be taken into account too. It's a balancing act, and compromises will sometimes need to be made.

The only other thing I'd say is that you may be getting too serious too fast. You've only been dating for six months. Give it time, enjoy your time with her, and see where things go. Maybe she's just looking for fun, not a life partner?

C

Well I can safely say she can take care of herself pretty well. She's not dependent financially to her ex. Rather the other way around.
They've been separated about 2 or 3 years so far.

Yep, I might give impression about getting serious too soon. However, I'm still enjoying her companion and try talk less about that.

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Old Today, 09:22 AM ? #8 (permalink)

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I personally don't think 6 months is "moving too quickly" to be thinking about a future together. I also think a couple years is plenty of time for her to have put her ex firmly in the past where he belongs.

It does sound like she's into you if she's waving him off, but I agree with you about the "honey" part. If she's working to get him to cool his jets, is she saying, "I don't want you to call me that any more" to him?

What makes the guy "a bit psycho" and is that your words or hers?

I'm with the others who say not to go behind her back and contact him, but I also think you're smart to want to see the bigger picture. I think it would be wiser to pull back a bit from your relationship for now and see what develops. You can explain that you're concerned about the fact that she isn't being genuine about her relationship with you to everyone and will treat it as the yellow flag that it is.

As far as her treating kids as #1 and you as secondary, this is true of some women but not all. Pay attention to the kinds of things she believes her kids have "rights" on and how much she backs them up (even if they're wrong) to get some idea of whether she'll be logical and balanced about things or not. When they have trouble in school or daycare, does she automatically blame anyone but her kids? Or does she make both parties responsible? How much does she pay attention to her children's side of the story and does she balance it against other information?

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Old Today, 09:38 AM ? #9 (permalink)

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Quote:

I personally don't think 6 months is "moving too quickly" to be thinking about a future together. I also think a couple years is plenty of time for her to have put her ex firmly in the past where he belongs.

It does sound like she's into you if she's waving him off, but I agree with you about the "honey" part. If she's working to get him to cool his jets, is she saying, "I don't want you to call me that any more" to him?

What makes the guy "a bit psycho" and is that your words or hers?

I'm with the others who say not to go behind her back and contact him, but I also think you're smart to want to see the bigger picture. I think it would be wiser to pull back a bit from your relationship for now and see what develops. You can explain that you're concerned about the fact that she isn't being genuine about her relationship with you to everyone and will treat it as the yellow flag that it is.

As far as her treating kids as #1 and you as secondary, this is true of some women but not all. Pay attention to the kinds of things she believes her kids have "rights" on and how much she backs them up (even if they're wrong) to get some idea of whether she'll be logical and balanced about things or not. When they have trouble in school or daycare, does she automatically blame anyone but her kids? Or does she make both parties responsible? How much does she pay attention to her children's side of the story and does she balance it against other information?

Thank you Kathie. Yep I was kinda hoping she asked her ex to stop calling her that. More importantly I want the ex to know that she's with me now, well yeah we're just dating. But how about some space, please? She's definitely not calling him the same way. She keeps his texts and calls mostly for kids business and nothing else.

Point is, I can feel that she's fond of me, so far. But she's kinda shy to be open about us to him. Yep she tells me how bad it might be if we're going full blown in front of him, he might try so hard to get her back. So the psycho word is coming from both of us.
And like I said, she wants us to go undercover until we're seriously about to be married. I don't know if it actually makes sense or just full of it?
Almost feels like she's having an affair with me, but it's really not either. Her mom and brothers confirm it.

Wish everything could be dead simple just like with a clean single girl coming from lovable families. But hey, you know how it is. It's not just like a matter of choosing iPhone or Android.

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Old Today, 10:22 AM ? #15 (permalink)

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Quote:

Oh well thank you. I don't know. She still turning her phones off after the argument we had. It's not a green light yet to open a conversation, and I'm not pushing her even further or it'll be the end of it.

If you were her, would you give this "control" to a man whom you date for the past 6 months? Or would you try to hide the new relationship and keep it off from your ex until everything is ready?

The answer to that depends on how into the new guy I am, doesn't it?

And that's the crux of your problem.

Whether you're a guy or a girl, when you're head-over-heels about someone, there's NOTHING that can come between you. You'd move mountains to make sure of it during that irrational logic part of the relationship. Your emotions will do your thinking instead of your head.

After 6 months, yes, I would give my new man more control than a person from my past. I would do that after 6 DAYS, to be honest. I don't owe anyone from my past anything, much less loyalty! There is a reason they're the past.

Her heart's not fully into it with you. Only you can decide what you want to make of that. But while she's thinking with her head, YOU are thinking with your heart. This makes you very vulnerable to getting hurt right now. This is why I said if I was in your shoes, I'd be calling that game. I'd pull back and get back to thinking with my head since it clearly would not be safe to be fully vulnerable in that situation.

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Source: http://talkaboutmarriage.com/general-relationship-discussion/66549-i-date-divorced-woman-2-kids-i-love-her-some-problems-though-help.html

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Rock Chalk Talk NCAA Tournament Bracketology

As if you didn't have enough options when it comes to bracketology, RCT's Byronkewel weighs in.

EAST
Washington

MIDWEST
Indianapolis

Lexington

Auburn Hills

1

Florida

1

Michigan

16

Vermont or Northeastern

16

Robert Morris

8

Georgetown

8

Iowa State

9

Wisconsin

9

UCLA

Austin

Salt Lake City

5

Kansas State

5

Marquette

12

Ohio

12

Wyoming

4

North Carolina State

4

Butler

13

Belmont

13

South Dakota State

Dayton

Auburn Hills

6

Creighton

6

Missouri

11

Kentucky or North Carolina

11

Middle Tennessee

3

Ohio State

3

Michigan State

14

Harvard

14

Valparaiso

Philadelphia

Lexington

7

VCU

7

Baylor

10

La Salle

10

Maryland

2

Syracuse

2

Louisville

15

Lehigh

15

Loyola (MD)

WEST
Los Angeles

SOUTH
Arlington

Philadelphia

Kansas City

1

Duke

1

Kansas

16

Charleston Southern

16

Southern or Norfolk State

8

Pittsburgh

8

Colorado State

9

Memphis

9

Notre Dame

San Jose

Kansas City

5

New Mexico

5

Ole Miss

12

Saint Mary's

12

Illinois

4

Oregon

4

Wichita State

13

Montana

13

Louisiana Tech

Salt Lake City

Austin

6

San Diego State

6

UNLV

11

Villanova

11

Oklahoma or Arizona State

3

Arizona

3

Miami (FL)

14

Long Beach State

14

Stephen F. Austin

Salt Lake City

Dayton

7

Minnesota

7

Cincinnati

10

Oklahoma State

10

Southern Miss

2

Gonzaga

2

Indiana

15

Mercer

15

Davidson

FIRST FOUR (Dayton)

To Lexington

To Austin

16

Northeastern

11

Oklahoma

16

Vermont

11

Arizona State

To Kansas City

To Dayton

16

Loyola (MD)

11

Kentucky

16

Norfolk State

11

North Carolina

Editors Note: Fetch is on a mini hiatus this week so his normal bracketology breakdown will resume next week. In addition to that we're also going to start throwing our own RCT bracketology out weekly by our own ByronKewel who has been handling the "Tipoff Vitals" posts for us this season. We'll start to back this with a few discussion points etc. but for now we're just going to throw this out there as a first run here at the end of January.

On another note, I've got a bit of a hiatus that I'm going to be on for Thursday, Friday and Saturday myself. I'll be heading back to Kansas City unexpectedly and away from 'the office' so to speak. I'll do my best to try to keep tabs on things, I've asked for some extra help from some of the authors but I also know that Fetch is very busy this week. That said, by all means this is a Jayhawk community so feel free to throw out, fanpost, comment away in whatever thread you want and keep talking about what's important. We're not going dark by any means, just some circumstances that might make the tail end of this week a little more challenging. Rock Chalk!

Owen

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Source: http://www.rockchalktalk.com/2013/1/30/3932150/rock-chalk-talk-ncaa-tournament-bracketology

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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Channing Tatum: I Hope I Don?t Screw Up Parenthood

"That [will] be the biggest role of my life. I hope I don't screw that one up," Tatum said humbly while promoting his latest movie, Side Effects, in Los Angeles on Saturday.

Source: http://feeds.celebritybabies.com/~r/celebrity-babies/~3/pvv22MaQOV4/

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Egyptian protesters violently defy curfew, rules

CAIRO/ISMAILIA, Egypt (Reuters) - Egyptian protesters defied a nighttime curfew in restive towns along the Suez Canal, attacking police stations and ignoring emergency rule imposed by Islamist President Mohamed Mursi to end days of clashes that have killed at least 52 people.

At least two men died in overnight fighting in the canal city of Port Said in the latest outbreak of violence unleashed last week on the eve of the anniversary of the 2011 revolt that brought down autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Political opponents spurned a call by Mursi for talks on Monday to try to end the violence.

Instead, huge crowds of protesters took to the streets in Cairo, Alexandria and in the three Suez Canal cities - Port Said, Ismailia and Suez - where Mursi imposed emergency rule and a curfew on Sunday.

"Down, down with Mohamed Mursi! Down, down with the state of emergency!" crowds shouted in Ismailia. In Cairo, flames lit up the night sky as protesters set police vehicles ablaze.

In Port Said, men attacked police stations after dark. A security source said some police and troops were injured. A medical source said two men were killed and 12 injured in the clashes, including 10 with gunshot wounds.

"The people want to bring down the regime," crowds chanted in Alexandria. "Leave means go, and don't say no!"

The demonstrators accuse Mubarak's successor Mursi of betraying the two-year-old revolution. Mursi and his supporters accuse the protesters of seeking to overthrow Egypt's first ever democratically elected leader through undemocratic means.

Since Mubarak was toppled, Islamists have won two referendums, two parliamentary elections and a presidential vote. But that legitimacy has been challenged by an opposition that accuses Mursi of imposing a new form of authoritarianism, and punctuated by repeated waves of unrest that have prevented a return to stability in the most populous Arab state.

WEST UNNERVED

The army has already been deployed in Port Said and Suez and the government agreed a measure to let soldiers arrest civilians as part of the state of emergency.

The instability unnerves Western capitals, where officials worry about the direction of powerful regional player that has a peace deal with Israel. The United States condemned the bloodshed and called on Egyptian leaders to make clear violence is not acceptable. ID:nW1E8MD01C].

In Cairo on Monday, police fired volleys of teargas at stone-throwing protesters near Tahrir Square, cauldron of the anti-Mubarak uprising. Demonstrators stormed into the downtown Semiramis Intercontinental hotel and burned two police vehicles.

A 46-year-old bystander was killed by a gunshot early on Monday, a security source said. It was not clear who fired.

"We want to bring down the regime and end the state that is run by the Muslim Brotherhood," said Ibrahim Eissa, a 26-year-old cook, protecting his face from teargas wafting towards him.

The political unrest in the Suez Canal cities has been exacerbated by street violence linked to death penalties imposed on soccer supporters convicted of involvement in stadium rioting in Port Said a year ago.

Mursi's invitation to opponents to hold a national dialogue with Islamists on Monday was spurned by the main opposition National Salvation Front coalition, which rejected the offer as "cosmetic and not substantive".

The only liberal politician who attended, Ayman Nour, told Egypt's al-Hayat channel after the meeting ended late on Monday that attendees agreed to meet again in a week.

He said Mursi had promised to look at changes to the constitution requested by the opposition but did not consider the opposition's request for a government of national unity.

The president announced the emergency measures on television on Sunday: "The protection of the nation is the responsibility of everyone. We will confront any threat to its security with force and firmness within the remit of the law," Mursi said.

His demeanor in the address infuriated his opponents, not least when he wagged a finger at the camera.

Some activists said Mursi's measures to try to impose control on the turbulent streets could backfire.

"Martial law, state of emergency and army arrests of civilians are not a solution to the crisis," said Ahmed Maher of the April 6 movement that helped galvanize the 2011 uprising. "All this will do is further provoke the youth. The solution has to be a political one that addresses the roots of the problem."

(Additional reporting by Edmund Blair and Yasmine Saleh in Cairo and Abdelrahman Youssef in Alexandria; Writing by Edmund Blair, Yasmine Saleh and Peter Graff)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/egypts-leader-declares-emergency-clashes-kill-dozens-031734034.html

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HP web store leaks 14-inch Chromebook Pavilion, to be unveiled on February 17

HP crafting 14inch Chromebook Pavilion, to be unveiled on February 17

Hewlett-Packard didn't have the best 2012, but that's not stopping the US company from getting on the Chromebook bandwagon. The HP Chromebook Pavilion was spotted by Slashgear on HP's own web store, despite the additional information section noting a February 17 "ad embargo" on the information. The little 14-inch Chromebook runs Google's eponymous OS with an Intel Celeron 847 CPU clocked at 1.1GHz, an Intel HD GPU, 2GB of DDR3 SDRAM (expandable up to 4GB), and 16GB of SSD storage space, put to use on the 14-inch HD BrightView LED-backlit display (1366 x 768 resolution). A trio of old-school USB 2.0 slots an HDMI out, and an ethernet jack make up the lion's share of ports, while an SD card slot adds expandable storage options. The 2.55Ah lithium-ion battery included will last up to (approximately) four hours and 15 minutes, though we'd like to put that to the test ourselves before trusting the specs sheet. Of course, it looks like it won't be too long before we hear more and get our hands on the device, given that Feb. 17th date.

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Comments

Via: Slashgear

Source: Hewlett-Packard (PDF)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/28/hp-pavilion-chromebook-leak/

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Primates too can move in unison

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Japanese researchers show for the first time that primates modify their body movements to be in tune with others, just like humans do. Humans unconsciously modify their movements to be in synchrony with their peers. For example, we adapt our pace to walk in step or clap in unison at the end of a concert. This phenomenon is thought to reflect bonding and facilitate human interaction. Researchers from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute report today that pairs of macaque monkeys also spontaneously coordinate their movements to reach synchrony.

This research opens the door to much-needed neurophysiological studies of spontaneous synchronization in monkeys, which could shed light into human behavioral dysfunctions such as those observed in patients with autism spectrum disorders, echopraxia and echolalia ? where patients uncontrollably imitate others.

In the research, published today in the journal Scientific Reports, the team led by Naotaka Fujii developed an experimental set-up to test whether pairs of Japanese macaque monkeys synchronize a simple push-button movement.

Before the experiment, the monkeys were trained to push a button with one hand. In a first experiment the monkeys were paired and placed facing each other and the timing of their push-button movements was recorded. The same experiment was repeated but this time each monkey was shown videos of another monkey pushing a button at varying speeds. And in a last experiment the macaques were not allowed to either see or hear their video-partner.

The results show that the monkeys modified their movements ? increased or decreased the speed of their push-button movement - to be in synchrony with their partner, both when the partner was real and on video. The speed of the button pressing movement changed to be in harmonic or sub-harmonic synchrony with the partners' speed. However, different pairs of monkeys synchronized differently and reached different speeds, and the monkeys synchronized their movements the most when they could both see and hear their partner.

The researchers note that this behavior cannot have been learnt by the monkeys during the experiment, as previous research has shown that it is extremely difficult for monkeys to learn intentional synchronization.

They add: "The reasons why the monkeys showed behavioral synchronization are not clear. It may be a vital aspect of other socially adaptive behavior, important for survival in the wild."

###

Yasuo Nagasaka, Zenas C. Chao, Naomi Hasegawa, Tomonori Notoya, and Naotaka Fujii "Spontaneous synchronization of arm motion between Japanese macaques." Scientific Reports, 2013 DOI: 10.1038/srep01151.

RIKEN: http://www.riken.jp/engn/

Thanks to RIKEN for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 8 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/126488/Primates_too_can_move_in_unison

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Monday, January 28, 2013

Rockets hand Jazz worst home loss, 125-80

From left, Houston Rockets' Chandler Parsons, Jeremy Lin, Patrick Patterson, Carlos Delfino and Greg Smith celebrate a teammate's 3-pointer against the Utah Jazz in the fourth quarter of their NBA basketball game, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013, in Salt Lake City. The Rockets won 125-80. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

From left, Houston Rockets' Chandler Parsons, Jeremy Lin, Patrick Patterson, Carlos Delfino and Greg Smith celebrate a teammate's 3-pointer against the Utah Jazz in the fourth quarter of their NBA basketball game, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013, in Salt Lake City. The Rockets won 125-80. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Houston Rockets' James Harden (13) celebrates his 3-pointer in the third quarter of an NBA basketball game against the Utah Jazz, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013, in Salt Lake City. Harden had 25 points as the Rockets won 125-80. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Houston Rockets' James Harden (13) drives around Utah Jazz's Randy Foye (8) during the second quarter of an NBA basketball game, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Houston Rockets' James Harden, rear, shoots as Utah Jazz's Paul Millsap (24) defends during the second quarter of an NBA basketball game, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Utah Jazz's Randy Foye (8) shoots as Houston Rockets' James Harden (13) defends during the second quarter of an NBA basketball game, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) ? The Houston Rockets had plenty of trouble getting to Salt Lake City as a blizzard left them grounded for a while in western Colorado.

Once they arrived, they made the Jazz pay, rolling to a 125-80 victory on Monday night and handing Utah the most-lopsided home loss in franchise history.

"We could have had Michael Jordan in his prime with us tonight . and it wouldn't have mattered (the way we played)," Jazz center Al Jefferson lamented.

"It was like everything went wrong. They came ready to play. I don't know where our energy was."

The Rockets, after recently suffering through a seven-game slide, are out of that funk. They have now won three straight and four of their last five.

"That's the way we have to play," Houston coach Kevin McHale said. "We have to play with pace. We have to move the ball. The ball can't get sticky. It's got to go from side to side. And guys just got to make plays."

James Harden continued to do most of the damage, scoring 25 points despite sitting the entire fourth quarter with the rest of the Rockets starters.

Harden, selected as an All-Star for the first time recently, has averaged 27.2 points in his last five games.

When he wasn't driving the lane, the Rockets were pouring in 3-pointers.

They hit 16 of 34 on the night to tie their season high for shots made beyond the arc.

But it was their pace that floored the Jazz, outscoring Utah 26-2 on the break.

"That's how we play," Harden said. "If you watch Rockets basketball, you know we get out in transition and we get some stops. We just try to do a good job of that for 48 minutes."

The Rockets held Utah to 39.5 percent shooting, and the Jazz made just 5 of 18 3-pointers.

Carlos Delfino and Marcus Morris each hit four 3-pointers alone for Houston and Omer Asik tied a career high with 19 rebounds.

Every Rockets player scored, including six in double figures, with Morris adding 16 and Delfino 14.

"It was just fun because everyone was getting involved," said Chandler Parsons, who added 12 points. "And it was right from the tip. We wanted to emphasize transition defense and taking care of the ball. We did those two things beautifully tonight and played unselfish. Everyone was just having fun out there and it's a lot more fun to play that way."

Houston led by 21 points in the second, by 35 in the third and kept pouring it on in the fourth.

The Rockets closed the third with three straight 3s ? two by Morris and one by Harden ? then saw Morris drain another 3 to open the fourth.

By then the fans were already booing and heading for the exits.

"We should have been booing ourselves," said Jefferson, who had 10 points on 5-of-13 shooting.

Randy Foye led Utah with 12 points.

Utah trailed by 50 points before a driving layup by Alec Burks and 3-pointer by rookie Kevin Murphy in the final 20 seconds.

Utah's previous most-lopsided loss at home was by 33 points to Milwaukee on Nov. 18, 1980. It was the fifth worst overall for the franchise.

"I don't think this ruins us," said Gordon Hayward, who did not play because of a sprained shoulder.

Still, the Jazz hardly looked like the team that had won nine of their previous 12.

They had been undefeated at home in January ? 6-0 ? with their last loss in Salt Lake City coming Dec. 28 against the Los Angeles Clippers in which they blew a 21-point lead.

Unlike the Jazz, the Rockets weren't about to blow this one.

"I think this is something we definitely needed," said guard Jeremy Lin, who took only five shots Monday but made all five to finish with 12 points.

It was a special trip for Lin, who arrived in Salt Lake City early enough Sunday night to slip in for the last screening of the documentary "Linsanity" during the Sundance Film Festival.

The movie premiered about a year after Lin began catapulting to worldwide stardom in New York. He was an afterthought only a month before, cut by the Rockets on Christmas Day and claimed by the Knicks off waivers.

If his rise to fame was crazy, so was Monday's game.

"It's a testament to how the ball moved tonight and how everyone was looking for everybody. When you have a team play like that, play so unselfishly, it's a beautiful thing to watch," Lin said.

NOTES: Eighty-nine-year-old Wataru Misaka, the first player of Asian descent to play in the NBA, was at Monday's game to watch Lin warm up. Misaka, once discriminated against because of his Japanese ancestry, recalled writing Lin a note of encouragement "when he was with Oakland back in the dark days when things didn't look too good for him. He didn't have all these fans at this time but he's made a lot of progress since then and I think he's in a much better place now." Misaka, who lives in nearby Bountiful, is a former point guard who played for the New York Knicks in the 1947-48 season and led the University of Utah to the 1944 NCAA championship. "He broke a lot of barriers and racial stereotypes," Lin told the Houston Chronicle of Misaka. "You have to pay respect to the people who came before you." Lin is the first American-born NBA player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-01-29-BKN-Rockets-Jazz/id-5d754b185a4a4b36adb11c8f211bb8ae

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China says concerned by Japan's move to boost military

BEIJING (Reuters) - China expressed concern on Monday after Japan unveiled plans to boost the number of its military personnel, as a bitter territorial dispute between the two countries drags on.

Japan's Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera said on Sunday the government would increase the number of personnel, now standing at about 225,000, by 287 in the next fiscal year starting in April, the biggest rise in two decades. The figure represents an expansion of about 0.1 percent.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said Japan should pay greater attention to regional concerns, alluding to Japan's at times brutal behavior during World War Two which China considers Japan has not done enough to atone for.

"Due to historical reasons, Japan's neighboring countries pay great attention to its military developments," Hong told a daily news briefing.

"We hope that Japan pursues a path of peaceful development, respects the concerns of countries in the region, take history as a mirror and does more to benefit regional peace and stability," he added.

China and Japan are engaged in an increasingly hostile dispute over a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.

Both sides sought to cool tension last week, with Chinese Communist Party chief Xi Jinping telling an envoy from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that he was committed to developing bilateral ties.

China's own military advances have rattled the region, including developing stealth fighters and launching the country's first aircraft carrier.

On Sunday, the government said it had again tested emerging military technology aimed at destroying missiles in mid-air.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/china-says-concerned-japans-move-boost-military-091054325.html

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Penicillin, not the pill, may have launched the sexual revolution

Jan. 28, 2013 ? The rise in risky, non-traditional sexual relations that marked the swinging '60s actually began as much as a decade earlier, during the conformist '50s, suggests an analysis recently published by the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

"It's a common assumption that the sexual revolution began with the permissive attitudes of the 1960s and the development of contraceptives like the birth control pill," notes Emory University economist Andrew Francis, who conducted the analysis. "The evidence, however, strongly indicates that the widespread use of penicillin, leading to a rapid decline in syphilis during the 1950s, is what launched the modern sexual era."

As penicillin drove down the cost of having risky sex, the population started having more of it, Francis says, comparing the phenomena to the economic law of demand: When the cost of a good falls, people buy more of the good.

"People don't generally think of sexual behavior in economic terms," he says, "but it's important to do so because sexual behavior, just like other behaviors, responds to incentives."

Syphilis reached its peak in the United States in 1939, when it killed 20,000 people. "It was the AIDS of the late 1930s and early 1940s," Francis says. "Fear of catching syphilis and dying of it loomed large."

Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but it was not put into clinical use until 1941. As World War II escalated, and sexually transmitted diseases threatened the troops overseas, penicillin was found to be an effective treatment against syphilis.

"The military wanted to rid the troops of STDs and all kinds of infections, so that they could keep fighting," Francis says. "That really sped up the development of penicillin as an antibiotic."

Right after the war, penicillin became a clinical staple for the general population as well. In the United States, syphilis went from a chronic, debilitating and potentially fatal disease to one that could be cured with a single dose of medicine.

From 1947 to 1957, the syphilis death rate fell by 75 percent and the syphilis incidence rate fell by 95 percent. "That's a huge drop in syphilis. It's essentially a collapse," Francis says.

In order to test his theory that risky sex increased as the cost of syphilis dropped, Francis analyzed data from the 1930s through the 1970s from state and federal health agencies. Some of the data was only available on paper documents, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) digitized it at the request of Francis.

For his study, Francis chose three measures of sexual behavior: The illegitimate birth ratio; the teen birth share; and the incidence of gonorrhea, a highly contagious sexually transmitted disease that tends to spread quickly.

"As soon as syphilis bottoms out, in the mid- to late-1950s, you start to see dramatic increases in all three measures of risky sexual behavior," Francis says.

While many factors likely continued to fuel the sexual revolution during the 1960s and 1970s, Francis says the 1950s and the role of penicillin have been largely overlooked. "The 1950s are associated with prudish, more traditional sexual behaviors," he notes. "That may have been true for many adults, but not necessarily for young adults. It's important to recognize how reducing the fear of syphilis affected sexual behaviors."

A few physicians sounded moralistic warnings during the 1950s about the potential for penicillin to affect behavior. Spanish physician Eduardo Martinez Alonso referenced Romans 6:23, and the notion that God uses diseases to punish people, when he wrote: "The wages of sin are now negligible. One can almost sin with impunity, since the sting of sinning has been removed."

Such moralistic approaches, equating disease with sin, are counterproductive, Francis says, stressing that interventions need to focus on how individuals may respond to the cost of disease.

He found that the historical data of the syphilis epidemic parallels the contemporary AIDS epidemic. "Some studies have indicated that the development of highly active antiretroviral therapy for treating HIV may have caused some men who have sex with men to be less concerned about contracting and transmitting HIV, and more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors," Francis says.

"Policy makers need to take into consideration behavioral responses to changes in the cost of disease, and implement strategies that are holistic and longsighted," he concludes. "To focus exclusively on the defeat of one disease can set the stage for the onset of another if preemptive measures are not taken."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Emory University.

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Journal Reference:

  1. Andrew M. Francis. The Wages of Sin: How the Discovery of Penicillin Reshaped Modern Sexuality. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2012; 42 (1): 5 DOI: 10.1007/s10508-012-0018-4

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/sOD_sCZNhYA/130128082906.htm

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Hate Crimes: A Rape Every Minute, a Thousand Corpses Every Y ...


Kit B. (308)
Sunday January 27, 2013, 9:15 am
(Image Credit: bling cheese)

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren?t that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large. Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they?re everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern.

There is, however, a pattern of violence against women that?s broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a case involving a celebrity or lurid details in a particular case get a lot of attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this country, in other countries, on every continent including Antarctica, constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.

If you?d rather talk about bus rapes than gang rapes, there?s the rape of a developmentally disabled woman on a Los Angeles bus in November and the kidnapping of an autistic 16-year-old on the regional transit train system in Oakland, California -- she was raped repeatedly by her abductor over two days this winter -- and there was a gang rape of multiple women on a bus in Mexico City recently, too. While I was writing this, I read that another female bus-rider was kidnapped in India and gang-raped all night by the bus driver and five of his friends who must have thought what happened in New Delhi was awesome.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it?s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn?t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

Here I want to say one thing: though virtually all the perpetrators of such crimes are men, that doesn?t mean all men are violent. Most are not. In addition, men obviously also suffer violence, largely at the hands of other men, and every violent death, every assault is terrible. But the subject here is the pandemic of violence by men against women, both intimate violence and stranger violence.

What We Don?t Talk About When We Don?t Talk About Gender

There?s so much of it. We could talk about the assault and rape of a 73-year-old in Manhattan?s Central Park last September, or the recent rape of a four-year-old and an 83-year-old in Louisiana, or the New York City policeman who was arrested in October for what appeared to be serious plans to kidnap, rape, cook, and eat a woman, any woman, because the hate wasn?t personal (though maybe it was for the San Diego man who actually killed and cooked his wife in November and the man from New Orleans who killed, dismembered, and cooked his girlfriend in 2005).

Those are all exceptional crimes, but we could also talk about quotidian assaults, because though a rape is reported only every 6.2 minutes in this country, the estimated total is perhaps five times as high. Which means that there may be very nearly a rape a minute in the U.S. It all adds up to tens of millions of rape victims.

We could talk about high-school- and college-athlete rapes, or campus rapes, to which university authorities have been appallingly uninterested in responding in many cases, including that high school in Steubenville, Notre Dame University, Amherst College, and many others. We could talk about the escalating pandemic of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment in the U.S. military, where Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta estimated that there were 19,000 sexual assaults on fellow soldiers in 2010 alone and that the great majority of assailants got away with it, though four-star general Jeffrey Sinclair was indicted in September for ?a slew of sex crimes against women.?

Never mind workplace violence, let?s go home. So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over 1,000 homicides of that kind a year -- meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11?s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular terror. (Another way to put it: the more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides since 9/11 exceed the number of deaths of victims on that day and all American soldiers killed in the ?war on terror.?) If we talked about crimes like these and why they are so common, we?d have to talk about what kinds of profound change this society, or this nation, or nearly every nation needs. If we talked about it, we?d be talking about masculinity, or male roles, or maybe patriarchy, and we don?t talk much about that.

Instead, we hear that American men commit murder-suicides -- at the rate of about 12 a week -- because the economy is bad, though they also do it when the economy is good; or that those men in India murdered the bus-rider because the poor resent the rich, while other rapes in India are explained by how the rich exploit the poor; and then there are those ever-popular explanations: mental problems and intoxicants -- and for jocks, head injuries. The latest spin is that lead exposure was responsible for a lot of our violence, except that both genders are exposed and one commits most of the violence. The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.

Someone wrote a piece about how white men seem to be the ones who commit mass murders in the U.S. and the (mostly hostile) commenters only seemed to notice the white part. It?s rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible: ?Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family.?

Still, the pattern is plain as day. We could talk about this as a global problem, looking at the epidemic of assault, harassment, and rape of women in Cairo?s Tahrir Square that has taken away the freedom they celebrated during the Arab Spring -- and led some men there to form defense teams to help counter it -- or the persecution of women in public and private in India from ?Eve-teasing? tobride-burning, or ?honor killings? in South Asia and the Middle East, or the way that South Africa has become a global rape capital, with an estimated600,000 rapes last year, or how rape has been used as a tactic and ?weapon? of war in Mali, Sudan, and the Congo, as it was in the former Yugoslavia, or the pervasiveness of rape and harassment in Mexico and the femicide in Juarez, or the denial of basic rights for women in Saudi Arabia and the myriad sexual assaults on immigrant domestic workers there, or the way that the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case in the United States revealed what impunity he and others had in France, and it?s only for lack of space I?m leaving out Britain and Canada and Italy (with its ex-prime minister known for his orgies with the underaged), Argentina and Australia and so many other countries.

Who Has the Right to Kill You?

But maybe you?re tired of statistics, so let?s just talk about a single incident that happened in my city a couple of weeks ago, one of many local incidents in which men assaulted women that made the local papers this month:

?A woman was stabbed after she rebuffed a man's sexual advances while she walked in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood late Monday night, a police spokesman said today. The 33-year-old victim was walking down the street when a stranger approached her and propositioned her, police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said. When she rejected him, the man became very upset and slashed the victim in the face and stabbed her in the arm, Esparza said.?

The man, in other words, framed the situation as one in which his chosen victim had no rights and liberties, while he had the right to control and punish her. This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

Murder is the extreme version of that authoritarianism, where the murderer asserts he has the right to decide whether you live or die, the ultimate means of controlling someone. This may be true even if you are ?obedient,? because the desire to control comes out of a rage that obedience can?t assuage. Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability may underlie such behavior, it also comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict suffering and even death on other people. It breeds misery in the perpetrator and the victims.

As for that incident in my city, similar things happen all the time. Many versions of it happened to me when I was younger, sometimes involving death threats and often involving torrents of obscenities: a man approaches a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will likely be rebuffed. The fury and desire come in a package, all twisted together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos, love into death, sometimes literally.

It?s a system of control. It?s why so many intimate-partner murders are of women who dared to break up with those partners. As a result, it imprisons a lot of women, and though you could say that the attacker on January 7th, or a brutal would-be-rapist near my own neighborhood on January 5th, or another rapist here on January 12th, or the San Franciscan who on January 6th set his girlfriend on fire for refusing to do his laundry, or the guy who was just sentenced to 370 years for some particularly violent rapes in San Francisco in late 2011, were marginal characters, rich, famous, and privileged guys do it, too.

The Japanese vice-consul in San Francisco was charged with 12 felony counts of spousal abuse and assault with a deadly weapon last September, the same month that, in the same town, the ex-girlfriend of Mason Mayer (brother of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer) testified in court: "He ripped out my earrings, tore my eyelashes off, while spitting in my face and telling me how unlovable I am? I was on the ground in the fetal position, and when I tried to move, he squeezed both knees tighter into my sides to restrain me and slapped me." According to the newspaper, she also testified that ?Mayer slammed her head onto the floor repeatedly and pulled out clumps of her hair, telling her that the only way she was leaving the apartment alive was if he drove her to theGolden Gate Bridge ?where you can jump off or I will push you off.?" Mason Mayer got probation.

This summer, an estranged husband violated his wife?s restraining order against him, shooting her -- and six other women -- at her spa job in suburban Milwaukee, but since there were only four corpses the crime was largely overlooked in the media in a year with so many more spectacular mass murders in this country (and we still haven?t really talked about the fact that, of 62 mass shootings in the U.S. in three decades, only one was by a woman, because when you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns but not about men -- and by the way, nearly two thirds of all women killed by guns are killed by their partner or ex-partner).

What?s love got to do with it, asked Tina Turner, whose ex-husband Ike once said, ?Yeah I hit her, but I didn't hit her more than the average guy beats his wife.? A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country. Just to be clear: not nine minutes, but nine seconds. It?s the number-one cause of injury to American women; of the two million injured annually, more than half a millionof those injuries require medical attention while about 145,000 require overnight hospitalizations, according to the Center for Disease Control, and you don?t want to know about the dentistry needed afterwards. Spouses are also the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S.

?Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined,? writes Nicholas D. Kristof, one of the few prominent figures to address the issue regularly.

The Chasm Between Our Worlds

Rape and other acts of violence, up to and including murder, as well as threats of violence, constitute the barrage some men lay down as they attempt to control some women, and fear of that violence limits most women in ways they?ve gotten so used to they hardly notice -- and we hardly address. There are exceptions: last summer someone wrote to me to describe a college class in which the students were asked what they do to stay safe from rape. The young women described the intricate ways they stayed alert, limited their access to the world, took precautions, and essentially thought about rape all the time (while the young men in the class, he added, gaped in astonishment). The chasm between their worlds had briefly and suddenly become visible.

Mostly, however, we don?t talk about it -- though a graphic has been circulating on the Internet called Ten Top Tips to End Rape, the kind of thing young women get often enough, but this one had a subversive twist. It offered advice like this: ?Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone ?by accident? you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can call for help.? While funny, the piece points out something terrible: the usual guidelines in such situations put the full burden of prevention on potential victims, treating the violence as a given. You explain to me why colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.

Threats of sexual assault now seem to take place online regularly. In late 2011, British columnist Laurie Penny wrote, ?An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the Internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they'd like to rape, kill, and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received, and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation, and abuse.?

Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened, and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in the words of a journalist, ?another wave of really aggressive, you know, violent personal threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And one man in Ontario took the step of making an online video game where you could punch Anita's image on the screen. And if you punched it multiple times, bruises and cuts would appear on her image.? The difference between these online gamers and the Taliban men who, last October, tried to murder 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai for speaking out about the right of Pakistani women to education is one of degree. Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan.

The Party for the Protection of the Rights of Rapists

It?s not just public, or private, or online either. It?s also embedded in our political system, and our legal system, which before feminists fought for us didn?t recognize most domestic violence, or sexual harassment and stalking, or date rape, or acquaintance rape, or marital rape, and in cases of rape still often tries the victim rather than the rapist, as though only perfect maidens could be assaulted -- or believed.

As we learned in the 2012 election campaign, it?s also embedded in the minds and mouths of our politicians. Remember that spate of crazy pro-rape thingsRepublican men said last summer and fall, starting with Todd Akin's notorious claim that a woman has ways of preventing pregnancy in cases of rape, a statement he made in order to deny women control over their own bodies. After that, of course, Senate candidate Richard Mourdock claimed that rape pregnancies were ?a gift from God,? and just this month, another Republican politician piped up to defend Akin?s comment.

Happily the five publicly pro-rape Republicans in the 2012 campaign all losttheir election bids. (Stephen Colbert tried to warn them that women had gotten the vote in 1920.) But it?s not just a matter of the garbage they say (and the price they now pay). Earlier this month, congressional Republicans refused to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, because they objected to the protection it gave immigrants, transgendered women, and Native American women. (Speaking of epidemics, one of three Native American women will be raped, and on the reservations 88% of those rapes are by non-Native men who know tribal governments can?t prosecute them.)

And they?re out to gut reproductive rights -- birth control as well as abortion, as they?ve pretty effectively done in many states over the last dozen years. What?s meant by ?reproductive rights,? of course, is the right of women to control their own bodies. Didn?t I mention earlier that violence against women is a control issue?

And though rapes are often investigated lackadaisically -- there is a backlog of about 400,000 untested rape kits in this country-- rapists who impregnate their victims have parental rights in 31 states. Oh, and former vice-presidential candidate and current congressman Paul Ryan (R-Manistan) is reintroducing a bill that would give states the right to ban abortions and might even conceivably allow a rapist to sue his victim for having one.

All the Things That Aren?t to Blame

Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the U.S. military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren?t likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds.

No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo?s Tahrir Square, and there?s just no maternal equivalent to the11% of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers. Of the people in prison in the U.S., 93.5% are not women, and though quite a lot of them should not be there in the first place, maybe some of them should because of violence, until we think of a better way to deal with it, and them.

No major female pop star has blown the head off a young man she took home with her, as did Phil Spector. (He is now part of that 93.5% for the shotgun slaying of Lana Clarkson, apparently for refusing his advances.) No female action-movie star has been charged with domestic violence, because Angelina Jolie just isn?t doing what Mel Gibson and Steve McQueen did, and there aren?t any celebrated female movie directors who gave a 13-year-old drugs before sexually assaulting that child, while she kept saying ?no,? as did Roman Polanski.

In Memory of Jyoti Singh Pandey

What?s the matter with manhood? There?s something about how masculinity is imagined, about what?s praised and encouraged, about the way violence is passed on to boys that needs to be addressed. There are lovely and wonderful men out there, and one of the things that?s encouraging in this round of the war against women is how many men I?ve seen who get it, who think it?s their issue too, who stand up for us and with us in everyday life, online and in the marches from New Delhi to San Francisco this winter.

Increasingly men are becoming good allies -- and there always have been some. Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy. Domestic violence statistics are down significantly from earlier decades (even though they?re still shockingly high), and a lot of men are at work crafting new ideas and ideals about masculinity and power.

Gay men have been good allies of mine for almost four decades. (Apparently same-sex marriage horrifies conservatives because it?s marriage between equals with no inevitable roles.) Women?s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together.

There are other things I?d rather write about, but this affects everything else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren?t so busy surviving. Look at it this way: one of the best journalists I know is afraid to walk home at night in our neighborhood. Should she stop working late? How many women have had to stop doing their work, or been stopped from doing it, for similar reasons?

One of the most exciting new political movements on Earth is the Native Canadian indigenous rights movement, with feminist and environmental overtones, called Idle No More. On December 27th, shortly after the movement took off, a Native woman was kidnapped, raped, beaten, and left for dead in Thunder Bay, Ontario, by men whose remarks framed the crime as retaliation against Idle No More. Afterward, she walked four hours through the bitter cold and survived to tell her tale. Her assailants, who have threatened to do it again, are still at large.

The New Delhi rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey, the 23-year-old who was studying physiotherapy so that she could better herself while helping others, and the assault on her male companion (who survived) seem to have triggered the reaction that we have needed for 100, or 1,000, or 5,000 years. May she be to women -- and men -- worldwide what Emmett Till, murdered by white supremacists in 1955, was to African-Americans and the then-nascent U.S. civil rights movement.

We have far more than 87,000 rapes in this country every year, but each of them is invariably portrayed as an isolated incident. We have dots so close they?re splatters melting into a stain, but hardly anyone connects them, or names that stain. In India they did. They said that this is a civil rights issue, it?s a human rights issue, it?s everyone?s problem, it?s not isolated, and it?s never going to be acceptable again. It has to change. It?s your job to change it, and mine, and ours.
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*****Numerous links within body of article for further reading and information at VISIT SITE****

By: Rebecca Solnit | alternet |

Why is this inappropriate?