Day: January 1, 2002

Bill to Criminalize Marital Rape Creates Controversy in Malawi

The BBC reports that a bill that make marital rape illegal is causing a great deal of controversy in the African nation of Malawi. Under Malawi’s current law, rape is nonconsensual sex with a member of the opposite sex who is not one’s spouse. Forcible sex with one’s spouse is not illegal.

Seodie White of Women in Law in South Africa told the BBC,

Courts have generally viewed rape, as created under the penal code, as not applying to married couples. And, based on our cultural beliefs, the consent to marriage has been recognised as automatic consent to sex even when the woman does not feel like it.

White’s assessment of the situation is confirmed by Malawi Supreme Court judge Duncan Tambala who the BBC reported as saying that making forcible sex within marriage a crime would be inconsistent with the concept of marriage itself.

“By entering into marriage each spouse is taken to have consented to sexual intercourse with the other spouse during the existence of his or her marriage.” Tambala said. “Marital rape, spousal battering and emotional abuse are not offences under domestic law.”

The proposed bill would punish marital rape with a minimum of 6 years in jail, but men interviewed by the BBC and African Eye News Service claimed the law would harm Malawi’s anti-AIDS effort and destroy families.

Source:

Row over Malawi marital rape bill. The BBC, December 26, 2001.

Marital rape is impossible. Brian Ligomeka, African Eye News Service, December 20, 2001.

Goal Attained — Three Million Page Views for 2001

Back in 1996 when I put up my first web page, I had one of those cheesy counters and was happy whenever it went up 6 or 7 notches in a day. For 2001, I averaged almost 8,300 page views each day across my web sites, meeting my goal of 3 million page views for the year. That’s 39 gigabytes worth of data transferred in 2001 — or almost 110 megabytes a day.

For 2002, the goal is at least 4 million page views which should be pretty easy to achieve (the last four months of 2002 I averaged more than 11,300 page views each day).

Over the past few months I have really focused on my Animal Rights site, which proved to be time well-spent. The first four months of 2001, it averaged only 23,000 page views each month, but the last four months racked up an average 64,200 page views per month.

For 2002, I’ll be taking all of the things I learned and worked up there, and concentrating on applying them to the other sites I run (including this site).

Afghanistan Will Reportedly Continue to Impose Sharia

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the new regime in Afghanistan will retain the Islamic law code that the Taliban adhered to, but will apply it more moderately.

The source for this is Afghanistan’s new Justice Minister, Abdul Rahim Karimi, who the Herald quotes as saying, “People would not understand if we get rid of it.”

This is actually a moderate view considering that chief Afghanistan Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif recently said that the new government would continue the Taliban practice of public executions and amputations. Karimi seems to want to step back from that saying, “How can you cut off the hand of a man who has nothing to eat? We must first feed the people and give them a livelihood.”

The reality is that what is that the new government in Afghanistan is likely to eventually resemble Saudi Arabia, with its moderation from the Taliban one of degree more than anything else.

The United States is thus faced with exactly the same problem it faced at conclusion of the successful campaign to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Who do you support (and how much) in a country where all the politically viable factions have cultural practices and views which are alien to what the overwhelming majority of Americans (not to mention U.S. law) find acceptable?

Source:

Stone me! The law’s gone soft. Agence-France Presse, December 29, 2001.

‘The Twilight Zone’ DVD Idiocy

After mentioning the Twilight Zone, I decided to check and see if the series was available on DVD yet. It is, but the way in which it is being released on DVD is downright bizarre. Like a lot of TV series issued on DVD, there are several DVDs that collect 3 or 4 episodes. What is bizarre is that the episodes in the Twilight Zone DVDs aren’t sequential.

So, for example, Twilight Zone Vol.15 includes Episodes 6, 39, 75 and 124.

I cannot for the life of me think of a reason not to put the episodes in sequential order.

Not Enough Time to Read

Jeannie Marshall wrote an article for the National Post which reminded me of a poster I saw by accident that gave me fits when I was in my late teens.

It was on one of my very infrequent trips to visit my father in Texas. My father was involved in a number of groups, including one that was tackling illiteracy. In a spare bathroom in his house which wasn’t used much he had hung this poster which was supposed to be optimistic, but which filled me with dread. I don’t remember the exact text, but the poster showed hundreds of books piled on top of each other and had text to the effect that if parents made sure their kids started reading early, they could read hundreds of books in their lifetime (I’m sure there was some other message, but it is the number of books that stuck with me).

The poster horrified me because I quickly realized that even assuming I lived to be 100 and averaged a book a week, I’d get through less than 5,000 books. Of course, I read much faster than a book a week, but still, the total number of books I can possibly read is only an extremely tiny percentage of the number of worthwhile books that have been published.

That is part of the reason that I am such a fanatical reader. This drives many of the people who know me in real life nuts. Toward the end of Marshall’s piece, she writes,

The surprising thing about those afflicted with reading anxiety is that they also tend to go out and socialize. They do not fit the stereotype of the reclusive bookworm. … These readers said they would never dream of canceling a social engagement in order to read.

Slackers! Then again, I definitely fit the stereotype of the reclusive bookworm. I take books everywhere. I have read books in plenty of situations that I am certain were completely inappropriate — I once read an econometric study of slavery during a wedding rehearsal, and an analysis of Clinton’s foreign policy at a wedding reception.

Remember that Twilight Zone episode (“Time Enough At Last”) where the rest of the world is destroyed and Burgess Meredith is left with his books and all the time in the world to read them, until he breaks his glasses? My wife says that is so much like me, it is eerie.

Goats as Malaria Vaccine Factories

So called “farmaceuticals” — genetically engineered animals that express drugs in their milk — has long been predicted as a likely eventual outcome of biotechnology efforts and that possibility took a big step forward with the recent announcement of initial success using mice to produce a malaria vaccine for monkeys. This advances is especially noteworthy since the technique used should scale well to larger animals such as goats, which could have an enormous impact on controlling disease in the developing world.

In this instance, researchers developed mice that secreted an experimental malaria vaccine in their milk. Two separate strains of transgenic mice were created, each of which carried a form of a gene to produce a surface protein of a strain of malaria. The mice were designed so that the gene to produce the proteins could be turned on only by the cells that line the animals’ mammary glands, ensuring that the proteins would be secreted in the milk of the animals.

The vaccine was then purified and injected into monkeys who were then exposed to the malaria parasite. In the extremely small experiment, only one of the five monkeys who received the vaccine contracted malaria, compared to six out of seven monkeys in a control group who did not receive the vaccine.

Doing this with mice is amazing, but here’s where things get very interesting. When researchers designed the mice to express the protein, they used DNA from goats, meaning it should be possible to create goats which also express the protein. In fact Science Daily reports that preliminary, unpublished research suggests the procedure works well in larger animals.

If this result holds, this could revolutionize vaccine research into diseases that largely afflict the developing world. Vaccine research in the developed world is problematic enough. Regulatory and liability issues, combined with expensive manufacturing processes have stunted vaccine research into diseases that still afflict people living in the developed world. When it comes to research on a vaccine for a disease like malaria, those concerns are even larger given the economic situation of much of the developing world (and hence the likelihood that much of the developing world would be unable to afford such a vaccine even if it were available).

Being able to have such medications produced by a herd of goats, however, would drastically lower the costs of such vaccines. Considering the World Health Organization estimates that as many as 1 million people die annually from malaria-related complications, this technology could have an enormous public health impact.

Sources:

Scientists Milk Animals for Malaria Vaccine. Science Daily, December 18, 2001.