Is he or isn't he? Around 11 pm on July 5, China's blogosphere began trading in rumors that Jiang Zemin, the former leader of the People's Republic, had died. By midnight local searches on this topic had become very popular. But within half an hour,…
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--Moral panic over transgender men and women is symptomatic of the Gulf's problem with shifting gender roles
As women in the Gulf become more visible, both socially and politically, and as migrants bring with them different ways of living, the…
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--Elaine McDonald loses overnight carer ruling as critics fear councils 'warehousing' people at home to cut costs
A former prima ballerina left disabled after a stroke has lost her supreme court battle for an overnight carer to give her "dignity and…
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Feraldo "Aldo" Saragi is a human rights activist who fights for the rights of sex workers and other marginalized groups in Indonesia. He founded a nonprofit group dedicated to social change and has spoken at the United Nations in New York about the unjust criminalization of sex workers. It's a personal issue for Aldo. Although he is passionate about defending the rights of others, he makes no secret of the fact that he is a sex worker himself.
The path that led Aldo to sex work, and eventually human rights activism, started with the Asian financial crisis.
Born to a poor family from Pematangsiantar, North Sumatra, he had to move to South Korea in 1995 to work as a migrant laborer for two years to save up enough money to attend a private university in Jakarta. While in university, he also worked as a laborer for a private company to support himself. But when the financial crisis hit the country in 1998, he lost his job and his ability to pay for his schooling.
"It happened everywhere. A lot of companies shut down, so it was an extremely hard time. Getting another job was impossible," the 35-year-old said. "On the other hand, the show must go on. Life keeps on rolling, no matter what."
Confused, Aldo said he decided he had to do something in order to survive. "Inspired" by an article he read in a lifestyle magazine about one spot in the capital where male sex workers hung out, he decided to join them.
"The situation made it difficult for me to choose. And really, at that time there was no other choice if you wanted to survive," he said.
Although it was not what he wanted to do, Aldo began his new profession as a sex worker, trading his services for anywhere between Rp 150,000 ($18) and Rp 200,000 ($23) per client.
"But I didn't have clients every day. There were just too many competitors and, with a lot of younger men joining, it made it even harder," he said.
Aldo said it took about two years before he was able to make peace with himself and what he did for a living.
"It was not easy to get to the stage where I could get over my internal conflict. I went through a lot of things to compensate, including seeking comfort in drugs," he said.
Twelve years have passed, and Aldo still does sex work. But he now considers himself an "empowered sex worker."
"I have a good bargaining position where I can, for example, choose not to take clients who refuse to use condoms when having sex. I am not financially desperate, like I was before," he said.
Even as Aldo's situation improved, he became more and more concerned about the way the government treated sex workers. He become increasingly involved in activism and in 2009, together with some friends, he founded the Indonesia Social Changes Organization (OPSI).
According to Aldo, the group represents and advocates for marginalized groups such as sex workers, homosexuals, transvestites, people with HIV/AIDS and drugs addicts. OPSI also addresses issues of discrimination and human rights violations caused by, among other things, government institutions and policies.
"For example, regional laws that call for the demolition of prostitution complexes. But the question is, does that solve all the problems? Those sex workers will find other ways to keep doing what they do because this is their livelihood, which helps them feed their babies, pay for their children's school tuition and so on," he said.
"The prostitution complex may be demolished, and, as a result, sex workers go to narrow alleys or boarding houses to look for clients. This is even more dangerous because the spread of HIV/AIDS is out of control."
There are currently around 1,500 sex workers registered as members of the OPSI, Aldo said, spread across 22 provinces. That number, he said, includes males, females and transvestites, although the majority of the organization's members are female.
Aldo was in New York in April and June to speak at the United Nations on the issue of sex workers' rights.
"I was a speaker at the UN Civil Society Hearing, which was part of their preparations for a high-level meeting on HIV/AIDS policy," Aldo said. "I was representing sex workers in Asia Pacific, not only Indonesia. My presentation was on 'decriminalizing key affected populations,' specifically sex workers."
Criminalizing sex workers is not a solution to the problem of HIV/AIDS, he said. It only makes their situation worse, since then they have no bargaining power.
"The UN made 'zero new infections, zero discrimination and zero HIV/AIDS-related deaths' one of their Millennium Development Goals. How can they reach that goal by 2015 if criminalization still occurs?" he asked.
Labeling female prostitutes wanita tuna susila, or women without morality, is also another form of criminalization and a violation of human rights, he said. The term WTS, he said, is still frequently used at the Ministry of Social Affairs. This, he said, is one of the things his organization has been fighting against.
"We urge [the government] to take sex workers out of the discrimination box and run programs that treat them like human beings. Look at how the officers treat sex workers during raids. That is not human at all," he said. "We have been trying to get sex workers accepted by the government. That is all we want."
The recognition of sex workers by the government will help combat HIV/AIDS, he said. When sex workers are recognized, the government will have the ability and authority to offer programs such as health reproduction awareness campaigns or programs encouraging the use of condoms in prostitution complexes.
Aldo said Health Minister Endang Rahayu Sedyaningsih shared his concerns. In a book, Endang wrote about her experiences working with sex workers in North Jakarta's Kramat Tunggak prostitution complex, which was tolerated by the government for years until it was turned into an Islamic center.
Endang, Aldo said, stated in her book that turning the red-light district into a religious center did not solve any problems.
"She said that there are now houses around the [Islamic] center where prostitution continues to takes place," he said. "When regulated, not only would we be able to reach everyone involved in awareness campaigns, but it could also create other job opportunities in the area, such as parking attendants, food vendors, and more."
The challenges, however, do not only come from the government and outside institutions.
"Internal conflicts are also a part of the challenges of our work," he said. "Religious values and cultural norms have managed to make them [sex workers] believe that they are society's trash. So getting beaten up by the police or public order officers is considered 'natural' because they believe they deserve that."
Aldo admitted that he sometimes felt exhausted from all of his efforts to get sex workers more rights and recognition from the government.
"But I can't stop here. I believe that the state will never give you your rights, you have to take them. You have to fight for them," he said.
"Few people realize that human rights apply to everybody equally - they don't say, 'Everyone except sex workers, gay and transvestites.' "
Women trying to conceive are better served by a urine test to determine if they are ovulating than the more commonly used calendar method, the makers of the test said at a Stockholm conference Tuesday.
"The calendar method is good to help women to start to understand how their cycle works, but if women are really trying to conceive ... it's not really the best method to use," said Jayne Ellis, head of scientific and medical affairs at SPD Swiss Precision Diagnostics, which makes the Clearblue ovulation test.
According to a study conducted by the company, the calendar method predicted ovulation correctly in only one in four women, while the test "predicted correctly in 99 percent of women over the same period," the authors of the study said in a statement.
The calendar method, which uses the previous cycle length and subtracts 14 or 15 days to give an estimate of the day of ovulation, is used by about 35 percent of women, the researchers found, pointing out that many websites and mobile phone applications offer calculation assistance.
Ellis and her team had asked a group of 101 women to collect daily urine samples for a total of 895 cycles, and then compared the accuracy with which the calendar method and the Clearblue test predicted peak fertile days.
"We found that the calendar method was inaccurate in predicting ovulation and therefore the peak fertile days," Ellis said in the statement, adding that "this is because it uses data from previous cycles which are naturally variable in many women."
The ovulation test, which like a simple pregnancy test comes in the shape of a pen, can when the tip is stuck into the urine flow detect a surge in luteinising hormones (LH) which trigger ovulation.
When using a 20-stick pack of tests, women detected their peak fertile days in 99 percent of the cases, the study showed.
"It really pinpoints for women the most fertile days to conceive in their cycle," Ellis told AFP.
The research team referred in its statement to previous studies showing that 46 percent of cycles in women between 18 and 40 vary by seven days or more, and that variations increase when women approach menopause.
"At a time when more and more women are delaying pregnancy until their 30s, it is increasingly important that they have a better understanding of their own menstrual cycles and the days on which they are fertile," the statement said.
A harrowing, savage and sexual thriller that turns genre fiction inside-out is launched this week.
A Disturbed Girl’s Guide to Curing Boredom, by debut novelist James Howell, already has a growing army of online fans, even though it is released for the first time this week.
More than 1,200 people worldwide have signed up to the Facebook fan page prior to publication by the independent Amygdala Press.
With the novel launching in electronic formats and paperback, the story of the rise and decline of journalist Hannah Harker will reach a global audience and promises to be the underground hit of the summer.
Author James Howell said: “Hannah Harker will be loved by some readers, and hated by others, but her story will force everyone to look at their own life and confront some very uncomfortable questions.
“Her actions and the consequences will sicken many people, but the underlying motivation behind what she does is simply to live a happy and rewarding life instead of being trampled into dull mediocrity by rules, authority and social convention.
“Everyone is capable of achieving more than they currently do, and hopefully Hannah Harker will provide a twisted inspiration for people to wake up and set their goals much higher.”
Mandy Sullivan, Operations Director at Amygdala Press, said: “There seems to be a growing demand for novels about strong, complex and off-the-wall female characters and the word-of-mouth interest we have seen across social media for A Disturbed Girl’s Guide to Curing Boredom has identified a very clear audience for us.
“Readers are really going to engage with the character Hannah Harker and we see this as just the first in a series of extreme and shocking adventures for her.”
Synopsis
Hannah Harker is bored. Her tedious job as a local newspaper reporter is grinding her soul to dust and she cannot find anything to interest or excite her.
Refusing to accept an average life of anonymity, she decides to tear up all the rule books and do everything in her power to find a cure for this boredom.
Free from the shackles of social convention and morality, she sets off down a dark and dangerous path that will change her forever.
A terrible tragedy of her own making sends her spiralling into meltdown and the lives of countless people get dragged into her twisted world.
Embarking on a brutal journey through Asia, she befriends arms dealers in Thailand, gangsters in Hong Kong and terrorists in Malaysia, while breaking the hearts of men and women at every turn.
As the clock ticks down to a shattering conclusion, the world can only pray that she self-destructs before creating the most staggering news event in history.
For more information visit http://www.disturbed-girl.com or call 020 7193 3745
If Aubrey de Grey's predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born. And the first person to live for 1,000 years could be less than 20 years younger.
A biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of a foundation dedicated to longevity research, de Grey reckons that within his own lifetime doctors could have all the tools they need to "cure" aging -- banishing diseases that come with it and extending life indefinitely.
"I'd say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing aging under what I'd call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so," de Grey said in an interview before delivering a lecture at Britain's Royal Institution academy of science.
"And what I mean by decisive is the same sort of medical control that we have over most infectious diseases today."
De Grey sees a time when people will go to their doctors for regular "maintenance," which by then will include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other advanced medical techniques to keep them in good shape.
De Grey lives near Cambridge University where he won his doctorate in 2000 and is chief scientific officer of the non-profit California-based SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, which he co-founded in 2009.
He describes aging as the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage throughout the body.
"The idea is to engage in what you might call preventative geriatrics, where you go in to periodically repair that molecular and cellular damage before it gets to the level of abundance that is pathogenic," he explained.
CHALLENGE
Exactly how far and how fast life expectancy will increase in the future is a subject of some debate, but the trend is clear. An average of three months is being added to life expectancy every year at the moment and experts estimate there could be a million centenarians across the world by 2030.
To date, the world's longest-living person on record lived to 122 and in Japan alone there were more than 44,000 centenarians in 2010.
Some researchers say, however, that the trend toward longer lifespan may falter due to an epidemic of obesity now spilling over from rich nations into the developing world.
De Grey's ideas may seem far-fetched, but $20,000 offered in 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review journal for any molecular biologist who showed that de Grey's SENS theory was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate" was never won.
The judges on that panel were prompted into action by an angry put-down of de Grey from a group of nine leading scientists who dismissed his work as "pseudo science."
They concluded that this label was not fair, arguing instead that SENS "exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt."
CELL THERAPY
For some, the prospect of living for hundreds of years is not particularly attractive, either, as it conjures up an image of generations of sick, weak old people and societies increasingly less able to cope.
But de Grey says that's not what he's working for. Keeping the killer diseases of old age at bay is the primary focus.
"This is absolutely not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health," he told Reuters. "This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age. The particular therapies that we are working on will only deliver long life as a side effect of delivering better health."
De Grey divides the damage caused by aging into seven main categories for which repair techniques need to be developed if his prediction for continual maintenance is to come true.
He notes that while for some categories, the science is still in its earliest stages, there are others where it's already almost there.
"Stem cell therapy is a big part of this. It's designed to reverse one type of damage, namely the loss of cells when cells die and are not automatically replaced, and it's already in clinical trials (in humans)," he said.
Stem cell therapies are currently being trialed in people with spinal cord injuries, and de Grey and others say they may one day be used to find ways to repair disease-damaged brains and hearts.
NO AGE LIMIT
Cardiovascular diseases are the world's biggest age-related killers and de Grey says there is a long way to go on these though researchers have figured out the path to follow.
Heart diseases that cause heart failure, heart attacks and strokes are brought about by the accumulation of certain types of what de Grey calls "molecular garbage" -- byproducts of the body's metabolic processes -- which our bodies are not able to break down or excrete.
"The garbage accumulates inside the cell, and eventually it gets in the way of the cell's workings," he said.
De Grey is working with colleagues in the United States to identify enzymes in other species that can break down the garbage and clean out the cells -- and the aim then is to devise genetic therapies to give this capability to humans.
"If we could do that in the case of certain modified forms of cholesterol which accumulate in cells of the artery wall, then we simply would not get cardiovascular disease," he said.
De Grey is reluctant to make firm predictions about how long people will be able to live in future, but he does say that with each major advance in longevity, scientists will buy more time to make yet more scientific progress.
In his view, this means that the first person who will live to 1,000 is likely to be born less than 20 years after the first person to reach 150.
"I call it longevity escape velocity -- where we have a sufficiently comprehensive panel of therapies to enable us to push back the ill health of old age faster than time is passing. And that way, we buy ourselves enough time to develop more therapies further as time goes on," he said.
"What we can actually predict in terms of how long people will live is absolutely nothing, because it will be determined by the risk of death from other causes like accidents," he said.
"But there really shouldn't be any limit imposed by how long ago you were born. The whole point of maintenance is that it works indefinitely."
Jose Baez said : I think we should all take this as an opportunity to learn and to realize that you cannot convict someone until they've had their day in court."
Me: I agree with that but as far as I have followed Anthony's case, she doesn't deserve that verdict...
Casey Anthony was found not guilty Tuesday of killing her 2-year-old daughter three years ago in a case that captivated the nation as it played out on national television from the moment the toddler was reported missing.
Anthony wept after the clerk read the verdict, which jurors reached after less than 11 hours of deliberation over two days. The 25-year-old was charged with first-degree murder, which could have brought the death penalty if she had been convicted.
Instead, she was convicted of only four counts of lying to investigators looking into the June 2008 disappearance of her daughter Caylee. Her body was found in the woods six months later and a medical examiner was never able to determine how she died.
Anthony will be sentenced by the judge on Thursday and could receive up to a year in jail for each lying count. Since she has been in jail since August 2008, she could walk free then.
After the verdict was read, Casey Anthony hugged her attorney Jose Baez and later mouthed the words "thank you" to him.
Prosecutors sat solemnly in their seats, looking stunned. Prosecutor Jeff Ashton shook his head slightly from side to side in apparent disbelief. Across the room, Anthony's father wiped tears from his eyes. Without speaking to Casey, he and his wife left the courtroom escorted by police as the judge thanked the jury.
"While we're happy for Casey, there are no winners in this case," Baez said at a news conference afterward. "Caylee has passed on far, far too soon. And what my driving force has been for the last three years has been always to make sure that there has been justice for Caylee and Casey, because Casey did not murder Caylee. It's that simple."
Independence Day is a great and proud day in our country's history, one in which we might benefit from reflecting on what independence really means. My experience suggests that most people who proclaim independence are living an illusion and actually…
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--WASHINGTON -- After Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, the White House released a photo of President Barack Obama and his Cabinet inside the Situation Room, watching the daring raid unfold.
Hidden from view, standing just outside the frame of that…
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--Thailand's first female prime minister looks like an easy-to-forget ex-Apprentice contestant
Age: 44.
Appearance: attractive but ultimately unmemorable ex-Apprentice contestant.
You're right. I don't remember her at all. What was her thing? She…
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--The Harrods code that all female staff must wear full makeup is hilariously exacting – and deeply discriminatory
A complaint made by Melanie Stark, a former member of staff at Harrods, claiming her bosses ruled she must wear makeup against her will,…
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--Mexican prison authorities find woman's partner curled up in foetal position in her suitcase as she left after conjugal visit
Police say a woman was caught trying to sneak her common-law-husband out of a Mexican prison in a suitcase following a…
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--Judges will decide if Sun and Mirror were in contempt of court over articles published after Christopher Jefferies' arrest
Contempt proceedings against the Sun and Daily Mirror over their coverage of the hunt for the killer of Joanna Yeates begin on…
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--Single shipment most likely source of deadly epidemic in Germany, France and US, says food safety watchdog
A single shipment of fenugreek seeds from Egypt is the most likely source of an E coli epidemic in Germany that has killed 49 people. It is…
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--Google has apparently killed off its Realtime search feature, or disabled it for a while, at the very least.
Google's recently unveiled social network, Google+, brought a host of changes with it, including a cleaner-looking user interface.
An…
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