Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Three letters you can send

By Heraclitus

First, here's a link to a form letter you can send to Ban Ki-Moon, Kofi Anna's successor as head of the UN, urging him to make Darfur a top priority. Granted, a letter to the UN is not something about which one can be especially optimistic, and this particular one uses rather vague language, but it's better than nothing. This is a good time to link again to Daily Darfur, a blog dedicated to all the news about the genocide in Darfur.

Also, Chris Clarke, who's now writing at Pandagon, has this post up chronicling a fairl complicated story about coal mines and the use of an underground water supply on Native American lands by a coal company. Read Chris's story for the details of both the present dispute and the history behind it (which is a tale of duplicity and exploitation of Native Americans by the US government and corporations, if you can believe that). You can read more here, and if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there's the email for the Office of Surface Mining. Just below that is a link to a sample letter that you can cut and paste into your email or just use as a guide (here's another link to the sample letter). The deadline is February 6th. As Chris says,
"How often can you send an email that helps protect Native rights, clean water and clean air and wild landscapes, and helps people try to mitigate climate change?"

And then this absolutely staggered me. A woman in Florida was raped; when she went to the police, they arrested her for not paying a fine from a juvenile arrest -- although the outstanding fine appears to be an error in paperwork. So, the police arrested a woman who had just been raped, figuring that they really should try to traumatize her as much as possible (see Nezua on their tireless efforts to pretext you). Then, when she was in jail -- where she was kept over a weekend and not allowed to post bail because it was Sunday -- she was denied the emergency contraception she asked for because the medical supervisor at the jail refused to give it to her, because it was "against her religion." I am not making this shit up. Planned Parenthood has a page where you can write and send an email to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.

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